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.'"

Comments

Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[LostCluster]

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.

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[NeutronCowboy]

maybe there just isn't any money to be made there without problems that threaten Google's reputation that it cashes in with elsewhere.

Good question. I doubt that the cost in loss of goodwill exceeds potential revenue in China. Which in turn means that there might be something else at play. Does Google want to play hardball with China? Is it concerned that the external costs of doing business in China (exposed servers, lots of red tape, etc) outweighs the revenue it gets from being available in China?

Either which way, I'm going to follow this. I doubt that much will change - but the various exchanges and discussions that come up around this should make for a good read.

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[afidel]

I wonder if the Google ad model works when your target audience has at best 1/4 the per capita GDP (one recent report put Beijing at $10K (much more than China as a whole but perhaps representative of Chineese internet users) as compared to $40k for the US)? In other words if ad revenue scales with GDP can Google still make money powering and maintaining servers if their revenue is 1/4 as much? And does ad revenue really scale with GDP? I would think not as necessarily less of that is available for non-essential purchases which is the majority of the market for advertisers.

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[Captain Splendid]

Good question. I doubt that the cost in loss of goodwill exceeds potential revenue in China.

Good summary of GP's point. Bu, then you say this:

Does Google want to play hardball with China?

There's no hardball involved. Google looks at China and goes "It cost us more than it's getting us." Pure business, with the added bonus of nice PR for being the first corp that said no to the PRC.

And this is devastating for the Chinese government. After keeping their populace docile and stupid, what they want more than anything else is to be taken seriously as an economic player, sit at the big boy's table and rake in some of that fat global trade cash. So, when one of the biggest companies around says China's market is more hassle than it's worth, it shows them up for the bumpkins that they still are.

But we knew this was coming (and hopefully Nixon did too). Can't have all the benefits of capitalism without losing some of the "benefits" of totalitarianism. You can have some of one and lots of the other (like most Western democracies), but not lots of both.

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[PopeRatzo]

I doubt that the cost in loss of goodwill exceeds potential revenue in China

Since the average annual wage for much of China is still about $500 per year, I think the financial calculus for dealing with them might be a little more complicated that you suggest.

Remember, even though annual disposable income in the big cities is as high as $2000 per year on average, there are one whole hell of a lot of people in China who are still dirt poor and aren't going to be buying a lot of products seen advertised on Google.

It's going to be interesting to see how this shakes out. I suspect that the core values of the founders of Google haven't changed that much over the years, but their great success may have led them to believe that they are as likely to change a repressive society like China or Iran as those societies are to change Google.

It still remains to be seen if their egos are right or not. Chinese society with all its complicated stratification and variety has been around a good deal longer than Google, but I've seen big and varied societies make enormous changes in a very short time during my own lifetime.

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[Arthur Grumbine]

I love and use Google's products, and am strongly against China's censorship, but if China backs down to Google on this I feel like I should be more frightened than elated.

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[phantomfive]

It's not the first foreign company that had massive problems with China, even in the last year. The government arrested employees of the Australian Rio Tinto steel company a few months ago, after negotiations broke down with a government backed company (the government didn't want to pay as much as Rio Tinto wanted to charge). The government arrested the employees for industrial espionage and bribing.

The scary thing is, it is essentially impossible for a foreign company to do business in China without bribes, even a small company. The Rio Tinto case wasn't publicized much in the mainstream media (at least in the US), but it was fairly well covered in the Wall Street Journal, and I guarantee executives of a lot of companies paid attention. Being arrested in China because the government doesn't like you is a risk that can outweigh a huge profit margin.

I would honestly suggest that if you are considering outsourcing to China, that you do it instead to India or Eastern Europe, because the unknowns are much smaller.

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[electrons_are_brave]

Normally I would agree with you, but China scares me more than Google.

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[mykos]

Well, at least google hasn't jailed people for thought and information crimes yet. If you see google as a possible evil, they are most certainly the lesser so far.

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Forget reputations. The big question here is if there's money to be made in China at all.

Over the last 10 years, there has been a roaring trade between the west and China. Ordinarily, this would be a great thing, but so far trade has been completely one sided. The fact is, the west has very little that the Chinese actually want to buy, or cannot manufacture themselves. Individual companies have been making short term gains by relocating their businesses to China; but in the long term, Chinese competitors (generally state subsidised) quickly emerge and dominate the local market and then the export market. For short term gain, western companies essentially write their own death warrants.

Google has gone into China. It has gotten nowhere. It's not the only company to see this happen. This big market, a fifth or the worlds population, turns out not to actually be worth the effort in most cases. Not only do you have to put up with the nineteenth century nonsense perpetuated by the communist party, you have to accept the fact that local competitors can and will eat you alive, either with state assistance, ruthless exploitation of labour, or by flat out ignoring the IP rules you hold so dear. Tell me the Western company that is making money in China itself. Making the kind of money that's going to help pay the balance of trade deficit that has emerged from the amount of money Chinese exporters have made in the last 10 years. Name me one.

China isn't worth it. At least not now. Come back in 30 years when the country has some human rights, democratic government and respect for trade laws. Then you can do, what is commonly called, business. There'll probably be a lot more money in people's pockets by that time too. Right now the whole country is a shell game you can never win, no matter how much you think the rules have to be the same. There's no point talking about gaining first mover advantage in a country where people can't even change jobs without a bloody chit. Not for the vast majority of companies.

Maybe Google will finally come to realise this. People may think its signals their return to the light side of the force. Personally, I'm inclined to think Google simply has a most ironic stance towards the personal data to compiles on the world population, jealously guarding it from all comers. Either way, Google leaving China will end up being a net positive for the company, its users, and the balance of trade deficit. The Chinese might lose a few search results, but frankly, that's the bed they've made for themselves right now.

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[Nikker]

Having Google in China is not really about advertising as much as a political tool to the Chinese. They see the rest of the world depending on Google for relevant and accurate search results so the Chinese government gives them Google search but they obscure the results, as a result the people believe they are on equal footing with everyone else. The Chinese people aren't really stupid they know 'big brother' is watching over most of their stuff but having a large presence as Google they can feel a tie to the "Western World", little do they know ....

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Can't have all the benefits of capitalism without losing some of the "benefits" of totalitarianism. You can have some of one and lots of the other (like most Western democracies), but not lots of both.

I think Singapore would beg to differ.

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[Dare nMc]

"It cost us more than it's getting us."

it probably isn't that simple. Google has to measure future value, or they may get stuck like some US based equipment manufactures did recently. IE years ago the China rules for big equipment orders (must build manufacturing in china...) was not profitable. Asian manufactures went in anyway. When china held up better, and did more stimulus money in manufacturing during this recession, the Asian manufactures were at a huge advantage with dealer networks, government contacts, China strategies... The US companies had to buy China partners to get in. Smart companies need to keep a finger on the pulse of these possibly emerging markets, if China opens up the disposable income gap could swap in a short time.

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[shutdown -p now]

Either way, Google leaving China will end up being a net positive for the company, its users, and the balance of trade deficit.

There's more to it than that. It would set a precedent. It would be something that make CEOs and boards of other companies wonder if they should at least review their strategy in China, and hopefully follow suit.

It would also get a lot of news coverage. Google is very well-known, enough so that a story like that would likely be run by all major Western TV channels, newspapers etc. This would be some awesome propaganda.

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[Trieuvan]

Similar thing happens in Vietnam (a small China's mirror) btw http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126311541085623535.html

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[darc]

According to the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/world/asia/13beijing.html):

Google did not publicly link the Chinese government to the cyber attack, but people with knowledge of Google’s investigation said they had enough evidence to justify its actions.

So I think it's a matter of the Chinese government seeking to uncover the identities of human rights activists by actively attacking Google's and other people's corporate network.

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[Captain Splendid]

I think Singapore would beg to differ.

Pff. So can Monaco. Call me when you have a real country.

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[ls671]

Don't forget China's population is 4,3 times the one of USA. That still makes and interesting market when you consider that there is always richer people in any population. Granted, it would constitute a smaller market than USA but still a larger market than many other countries.

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[Zontar The Mindless]

Singapore is a microstate. China is anything but.

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[coaxial]

And this is devastating for the Chinese government. After keeping their populace docile and stupid,

Clearly, you've never met an actual Chinese person. Do you honestly think they don't know what's going on? No, they know. They just don't care. They're lives have been massively transformed for the better. Especially for those on the coast. (The western interior is another story.) They don't want to rock the boat. Everything is going swimingly for them. Why change?

what they want more than anything else is to be taken seriously as an economic player, sit at the big boy's table and rake in some of that fat global trade cash.

As the world's largest exporter, and fastest growing economy, aren't they already?

So, when one of the biggest companies around says China's market is more hassle than it's worth, it shows them up for the bumpkins that they still are.

Yeah, but Google isn't the biggest in China. It's Baidu. Blogging? That's MSN Spaces. I've yet to meet a Chinese student that does not have an MSN Spaces account. Twitter? I'm sorry. Did you mean Plurk?

Seriously, it's a whole other world outside the US, and you don't seem to know its players.

But we knew this was coming (and hopefully Nixon did too). Can't have all the benefits of capitalism without losing some of the "benefits" of totalitarianism. You can have some of one and lots of the other (like most Western democracies), but not lots of both.

Well that's the line Wall Street sold us back in 1989 while the Tianamen Square was still damp wasn't it? It's been 20 years. While some may argue the jury may still be out on that one (I wouldn't.); it's been long enough to get some indication of how its leaning, Let's examine the facts shall we?

China's GDP growth was at 11% last quarter, for year-over-year growth of about 8%, and just now replaced Germany as the world's leading exporter. (Funny, how does a "Socialist" European Free Market(tm) democracy be former world's largest exporter, but the US can't be? The mind reels. Oh wait. No it doesn't.) Now China is luring back it's top talent, by offering them better opportunities. Allow me to quote from that article:

These scientists were not uniformly won over by the virtues of democracy, either. While Dr. Rao said he hoped and believed that China would become a multiparty democracy in his lifetime, Dr. Shi said he doubted that that political system “will ever be appropriate for China.”

As a Tsinghua student, Dr. Shi joined the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square. As a registered Democrat in the United States, he participated eagerly in elections. “Multiparty democracy is perfect for the United States,” he said. “But believing that multiparty democracy is right for the United States does not mean it is right for China.”

Such is the sweet taste of liberty, eh?

No, I believe that China has found it's third way. Not only "To be rich is glorious", but "Sometimes when we [Chinese] have the faith we have to take different approaches to realize our beliefs. The ultimate goal is the common prosperity, but we have to let a group of people to get rich first." Or as Slate put it, "How do you say 'trickle down' in Mandarin?"

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[sopssa]

The ads are almost always localized and hence also have different click prices in different countries, based on competition. That's why the per capita GDP doesn't matter as much, it's all just scaled down lower. You also have to remember that Google needs to crawl all those websites anyway, and they don't have to do it in China. Also Google can almost endlessly optimize their ad systems for different markets. Not profitable enough? Show more ads or try to raise click prices in China until it's profitable enough.

The only thing that matters is that if Google doesn't understand how chinese market and culture work and how people have got used to things, which can be quite different from US and Europe.

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not the first foreign company that had massive problems with China, even in the last year. The government arrested employees of the Australian Rio Tinto steel company a few months ago, after negotiations broke down with a government backed company (the government didn't want to pay as much as Rio Tinto wanted to charge). The government arrested the employees for industrial espionage and bribing.

An acquaintance works for a Canadian company that sells machines to apply a specialized chemical coating to certain types of containers (the vagueness is intentional). A trip of executives and engineers resulted in a sale of four units (enough for a small company) and a couple of hundred thousand liters of coating to a mid-size Chinese company.

On the next trip their were no more sales. In fact, the machines were reverse engineered (as was the coating substance) and are actively being sold at a fraction of the price, despite that all of the Canadian stuff had appropriate IP protection.

Between this sort of stuff and the shenanigans that the Chinese are involved in with respect to cooking the books of their stock markets, I'm not so sure I'd call them an "emerging market". More like an "emerging bubble" waiting to take down their investors in the next few years.

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[twostix]

"the government didn't want to pay as much as Rio Tinto wanted to charge"

Which is the crux of the issue with China that I pray people in the west start waking up to.

When you do business in China, you're doing business with the corrupt and totalitarian Chinese Government - a nasty operation that has no intent of *ever* being any less corrupt and ruthless than it is now. The separation between any so called "private" business and the government (especially big business) in China is whatever the party leaders say it is at any given moment. Rio thought they were negotiating a tough iron ore deal with the Chinese foundries as they would do with any private business in any western democracy, that is they played hardball with them.

The problem is, the Chinese government decided it didn't like said foundries being negotiated with in such a harsh manner (who does this pip squeak company think it is embarrassing us internationally!) and so threw the top man Rio man in China in gaol where it then took three months to even bother *charging* him.

And of course we know the upstanding state of justice in the Chinese legal system...

Dear corporate west, if you deal with the totalitarian devil you will eventually get burned.

A lesson that should have been learned once and for all in the 1930s.

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[budgenator]

Personally I think China in it's present form is toast, first the Himalayan glaciers are receding precipitously due to Black soot particulates,which will devastate the Asian watershed, we're heading into 30 years of mini-ice age, Beijing was hit by its heaviest snowfall in 60 years so Asian agriculture may be in for quite a hard time. Cold, thirsty and hungry people get mean, and some kind of massive change is coming as far as China, the magic eight ball says "it's a good time to get the hell out of Dodge".

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[Maxmin]

After keeping their populace docile and stupid...

That's untrue. Mainland China's people aren't stupid (maybe some are ignorant, many afraid), and a few brave ones conjure up the balls to endure the inevitable beat-back that always comes when questioning authority.

A better way to characterize the effect of PRC's viciously retrograde policies against their own people might be "repressed and pwned," given the deeply fucked-up nature of the authoritarian and communist government there.

While China's economic liberalization may leave more coin jingling in the average worker's pocket, all else remains the same. Makes me wonder if the West's political mollycoddling of PRC was ever intended to benefit their people, or if it was just to retain a cheap manufacturing source.

There's no hardball involved. Google looks at China and goes "It cost us more than it's getting us." Pure business, with the added bonus of nice PR for being the first corp that said no to the PRC.

Absolutely spot-on. Let us hope they follow it through to total withdrawl and contribute some loss of face for PRC's communist party. Let's not forget the near-complete blind eye turned by Western governments and the lame-stream media during the Olympics in Beijing not so long ago.

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[dangitman]

Well, at least google hasn't jailed people for thought and information crimes yet.

Really? How do you think their vast "data centers" are powered? By electricity or some shit? How do you think a Google search works? A "computer" uses some fancy "algorithm" to query a "database"?

It's people. Google is made out of people. They're making our information out of people. Next thing they'll be breeding us like cattle for food. You've gotta tell them. You've gotta tell them!

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[DDLKermit007]

Oh seriously, you believe there is a market of over a billion in China? Only around 300 million of those people are considered above poverty (for China), and a very small percentage of that have what the average American would call an acceptable income. Yes it's an emerging market, but who cares when the guys down the street will just nockoff your product within a month? Sure it'll be inferior, but it'll be less than half the price of yours.

Hell look at the current debacle with Cadmium. One of the excuses given that it's even used is that jewlery made of it is usually marked for sale only in China. At least people here have the ability to find out in retrospect lil-Jamie's necklace you gave her for X-Mas impairs brain function. In China that junk is sold all over without someone even thinking about it.

I travel to China frequently, and see this kind of thing happening all over. Market of over a billion my ass. More like market of just over a billion waiting to see what they can copy next.

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[guanxi]

Clearly, you've never met an actual Chinese person. Do you honestly think they don't know what's going on? No, they know. They just don't care. They're lives have been massively transformed for the better. Especially for those on the coast. (The western interior is another story.) They don't want to rock the boat. Everything is going swimingly for them. Why change?

As a Tsinghua student, Dr. Shi joined the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square. As a registered Democrat in the United States, he participated eagerly in elections. "Multiparty democracy is perfect for the United States," he said. "But believing that multiparty democracy is right for the United States does not mean it is right for China."

How many have you met, out of 1.2 billion, that you can speak for the Chinese people? Have you met those in prisons or those who can't get jobs because of their political beliefs? What about those who can't practice their religion? What about those who censor their beliefs so they can keep their jobs? What about those in Tibet? In Xinjiang? What about those protesting against the government all over China, because their rights are ignored and trampled by a political establishment which has no responsibility to the people (because they can't be voted out of office)? Why must the Communist Party jail democracy advocates and censor the Internet, if their people don't want it?

Your claims repeat the Communist Party line (and quote people who risk their jobs if they disagree), which itself is the same old canard despots worldwide have used: It's a Western cultural thing, not appropriate in our culture; our people don't want it. (And if they say they do, we put them in jail.) But the facts are overwhelming: Democracy and freedom are desires and values universal to humanity. The people of South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, India, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa and others, representing almost every other non-Western culture, have adopted it with great success. Only those who are forcibly repressed by their government are denied it. And all over the world, nearly 100% of the most prosperous, stable countries are democracies.

Every democracy started out as undemocratic and unfree (including the U.S. if you count the colonial era). To say the people of China lack the motivation or ability to seize it for themselves is patronizing and insulting. They have come so far from the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, when a totalitarian dictator's incompetence and obscene disregard killed tens of millions and reduced their country to shambles, to today's relatively stable government and rocketing prosperity. There is no reason to think they will not continue and eventually enjoy the freedom and prosperity that so many others have achieved.

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[electrons_are_brave]

Google china breaks too easily and isn't dishwaher safe. Chinese google has too much MSG.

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[mgblst]

Google got $300 million in revenues last year in China. Sure, that might not be as much as you earn, with your ill informed postings around the internet, but it is still a lot of money.

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[Skjellifetti]

Rio Tinto is an iron ore miner that sells the ore to Chinese and Japanese steel producers. They don't make the steel themselves. An article in today's Financial Times claims that the big iron ore producers have frozen China out of talks on iron ore prices and are negotiating pretty much with the Japanese and then will make the Chinese steel producers a "take it or leave it" offer based on those prices.

The decision to sideline Beijing is remarkable as China is the largest iron ore importer, accounting for more than 50 per cent of the seaborne market.

The miners have so far held no substantive negotiations with the Chinese side, led by Baosteel, the big state-owned steel mill, according to people familiar with the talks.

They added that there were no plans to travel to China for talks, meeting instead in Singapore.

One executive said: "As far as I am concerned, they [the Chinese negotiators] could come over to Australia if they want to talk."

There are some allegations making the rounds that Obama was played by the Chinese in Copenhagen. The mining case plus Google's actions makes me wonder if the West has decided that China has gotten too big for its britches and is being reminded that they are not a superpower yet and that they need to learn to be a little more cooperative with the rest of the world.

India, O.K. Eastern Europe? Stay out of Russia. Guy I know had his business taken over by the Russian Mob. There is no Rule of Law in either Russia or China.

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[noliver]

You might want to read Google's Blog post about the introduction of google.cn: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/testimony-internet-in-china.html

The short of it is that since google.com wasn't self-filtering, the government was filtering at the border, which led to slow and unreliable service, in addition to the filtering. Google decided that on the whole, it was better to provide an additional filtered local (and thus reliable) service than to leave the chineese with only a service that didn't work well (from the user's standpoint). And since it was additional, they didn't take away anything.

That, and it was good for business.

From the 2006 post, edited for length:

[In the fall of 2002, Google suddenly became completely unreachable from within China. Google did nothing, and about two weeks later, it could be reached again.]

However, we soon discovered new problems. Many queries, especially politically sensitive queries, were not making it through to Google’s servers. And access became often slow and unreliable, meaning that our service in China was not something we felt proud of. Even though we weren’t doing any self-censorship, our results were being filtered anyway, and our service was being actively degraded on top of that. Indeed, at some times users were even being redirected to local Chinese search engines Nevertheless, we continued to offer our service from outside China while other Internet companies were entering China and building operations there.

[much later in the testimony]

Since 2000, Google has been offering a Chinese-language version of Google.com, designed to make Google just as easy, intuitive, and useful to Chinese-speaking users worldwide as it is for speakers of English. Within China, however, Google.com has proven to be both slow and unreliable. Indeed, Google’s users in China struggle with a service that is often unavailable. According to our measurements, Google.com appears to be unreachable around 10% of the time. Even when Chinese users can get to Google.com, the website is slow (sometimes painfully so, and nearly always slower than our local competitors), and sometimes produces results that, when clicked on, stall out the user’s browser. The net result is a bad user experience for those in China.

The cause of the slowness and unreliability appears to be, in large measure, the extensive filtering performed by China’s licensed Internet Service Providers (ISPs). ... China has nine licensed international gateway data carriers, and many hundreds of smaller local ISPs. Each ISP is legally obligated to implement its own filtering mechanisms, leading to diverse and sometimes inconsistent outcomes across the network at any given moment. For example, some of Google’s services appear to be unavailable to Chinese users nearly always, including Google News, the Google cache..., and Blogspot... . Other services, such as Google Image Search, can be reached about half the time. Still others, such as Google.com, Froogle, and Google Maps, are unavailable only around 10% of the time.

Even when Google is reachable, the data indicates that we are almost always slower than our local competitors. Third-party measurements of latency ... suggest that the average total time to download a Google webpage is more than seven times slower than for Baidu, the leading Chinese search engine.

...

Based on our analysis of the available data, we believe that the filtering performed by the international gateway ISPs is far more disruptive to our services than that performed by smaller local ISPs. Because Google’s servers have, to date, been located exclusively outside China, all traffic to and from Google must traverse at least one of China’s international gateway ISPs. Accordingly, Google’s access problems can only be s

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[asaz989]

Singapore: 5 million people, an army, a decent-sized player in regional organizations, an economy based on actual production and trade. Monaco: 30,000 or so people, an economy based on being a tax haven for the French, and no army (because the entire country is so small that, about a hundred years ago, they realized the entire country was within artillery range of the outside). Bit of a difference, no?

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[davidbofinger]

the corrupt and totalitarian Chinese Government

I agree corrupt, and would agree authoritarian. But "totalitarian" means that the government tries to run everything. That arguably used to be true of China, in the days of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, but hasn't been true since Deng's reforms of the late 1970s and 1980s.

If the mainstream of communism was Marxism-Leninism, where Marxism means (economic) totalitarianism and Leninism means authoritarianism, then China is still Leninist but has ditched the Marxist bit. This contrasts with Gorbachev, who tried to dump Marxism (via perestroika) and Leninism (via glasnost) simultaneously. Russia's subsequent prostration, and China's rise, have almost certainly been received by the Chinese leadership as proof they made the right call.

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[Puff_Of_Hot_Air]

The irony is that Rio Tinto is one of the very few companies that have played straight up in China. They do not bribe in China, and this has angered no small number of officials. In this instance the Australian executive that has been detained was born in China. This is China's way of instilling fear into other similiar Chinese born to not f**k with the motherland. I have to imagine that it will work.

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[Rand310]

The internet has an interesting barrier on entry though - a computer and an internet connection. If you can afford those things in China, you can afford what is being advertised to you. The 'average' wages tell you little about the distribution of wealth in China. There are a number of very well off people living in the large cities. Luxury cars have a 100% luxury tax, and yet you still see countless Ferraris, BMWs & Mercedes. And even if the proportion of the population that is wealthy enough to be a customer of Google is much smaller than in the US or elsewhere, you get to multiply it by their enormous population. I don't have the numbers, but I would wager that by number there are a great deal more (USD) millionaires in China than there are in particular smaller European states, and Google seems to do well in those places.

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[sydneyfong]

Democracy and freedom are desires and values universal to humanity. The people of South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, India, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa and others, representing almost every other non-Western culture, have adopted it with great success.

I wouldn't call all of those examples "great" success. Taiwan's first truly democratic elected president is now in jail, probably for life. Japan had what, 4 prime ministers in 3 years? Sure, that's not a failure, but it's not all roses either.

And not to count the unstable "democracies" in South East Asia - Thailand, Indonesia, etc...

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[VShael]

Dear corporate west, if you deal with the totalitarian devil you will eventually get burned.

A lesson that should have been learned once and for all in the 1930s

And this is why Prescott Bush did not live in Nazi Germany when striking deals with them.
You can still make a lot of money dealing with the totalitarian devil. You just don't get to be stupid, when doing it.

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[G-forze]

Misspelled "Chinese"?

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[TapeCutter]

Just a few points...

1. Almost all glaciers are receding precipitously due to AGW, the slashdot article you point to is about the fact that Himalayan glaciers are retrtreating at a faster rate due to soot. The effect of soot on ice has been well documented over the last 50yrs.

2. Your magic eight ball is more informative than Anthony Watts. Watts is either a popogandist or a crank.

3. The world is not heading into 30 years of mini-ice age.

4. There will always be cold spells.

However I agree with your conclusion, the IPCC has been pointing out for over a decade now that the delta's in southern China, India and Bangladesh which currently support well over a billion people are "toast". I doubt the rest of the world will suddenly forget nationalisim and allow those people to simply "get out of Dodge".

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[guanxi]

No government is all roses -- I can't think of one that is -- that's not the standard by which they are measured. It's a good sign when politicians can be removed from office and even jailed. Politically, economically, and by almost any other measure, Taiwan and Japan are much better off than China.

(For the record, Taiwan's first democratically elected President, Lee Teng-hui, is not in jail; a successor, Chen Shui-bian was jailed after he left office.)

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[raju1kabir]

I believe that Singapore's biggest issues right now stem from the remnants of the SARS outbreak (equivalently like nuclear power suffers in the US because of 3 mile island), terrorism (granted, a global issue), and of course the problems of linguistic development.

SARS? I don't think so.

The biggest problem in Singapore right now is the global economic downturn and its ripple effects through the local economy. On the other hand, the government has been smart about seizing the opportunity to do some major infrastructure work (such as 2 new subway lines which would have been massively more expensive during boom times).

Terrorism is a non-issue, despite the occasional outbursts of noise about it. Likewise the catastrophe of some children using broken Mandarin or Hokkien to talk with their grandparents.

However, I agree with you that illegal immigration is also not a big deal, and it's being handled fine by the authorities. They're more worried about encouraging legal immigration. They need young smart fertile people, and have been working hard to get them there.

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[TapeCutter]

Yeah it's a lot of money but $300 Million out of a total of $22 Billion is barely more than 1%. Also revenue alone tells you nothing about earnings.

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[mwvdlee]

I remember using search-engines back when the blink tag was still considered state-of-the-art and 33K6 modems were considered fiction. So yes, cellphone web access is web access. These users will still use search-engines and google could still be pushing advertising on them.

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[regular_gonzalez]

What you call a failure I'd call a great success, showing a robust system that is operating well. A ruler in power for 50 years worries me much more than one that rules for 5 months.

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[kegon]

You mean the people of Singapore have a different opinion ?

Because you can't seriously be saying that Singapore has a different balance: I know that Singpore is a capitalist country with lots of totalitarianism. They may be in self-denial about it, but that's how totalitarianism works.

Singaporeans think they are free to talk about anything they like, as long as it is in private. They don't expect complete freedom, all the time, for the sake of harmony. And they are told what to think; it comes via PSAs and other media outlets.

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[Rysc]

Perhaps true, perhaps not true.

A great system should be built to *withstand* and *survive* a nut job in the top job in the government without major instability.

The fact that a democracy has incompetent or corrupt leaders now and again, or even frequently, is a sign of strength: They get replaced and the government keeps marching on.

Re:Free trade of ideas, anyone?

[Rich0]

But "totalitarian" means that the government tries to run everything.

I don't think that is really the definition of totalitarian.

From WP:
Totalitarianism (or totalitarian rule) is a political system where the state, usually under the control of a single political organization, faction, or class domination, recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible.

That is in line with most definitions I've seen for the term. It doesn't mean that the government does run everything, but only that the government has the power to run anything that it cares to.

In China there are no effective constraints on government power, except to the degree that they're limited by the laws of physics and resources (the rulers of China aren't actually gods). If the ruling class feels that a particular policy is beneficial to them, they have the power to enforce it. It is a crime to merely criticize the Chinese government, even if enforcement of this is imperfect.

The Chinese government realizes the economic benefits of a market economy, and so they ALLOW the market to function with a fair amount of freedom. However, this is an arrangement of convenience and when the rulers feel the need they can step in and do whatever needs to be done - with no due process of law.

This is in contrast to most democratic nations. If you live in France and the government doesn't like what you are saying, they pretty-much just have to live with it. If they think that you've committed a crime they have to follow due process and charge you in a reasonable time frame and give you a trial. In most democratic nations you are tried by a jury of your peers.

There are certainly exceptions - such as the recent anti-terrorism actions by the US Government. The fact that many people consider these actions outrageous and protest them is telling. In China such actions would be routine, and they do not suffer public criticism. Hopefully the US will move away from these kinds of policies, and I think that most politicians realize that they have overstepped their bounds. This sort of behavior is a step in the direction of totalitarianism.

I'd argue that China is as totalitarian a state as any has ever been. There can never be perfect totalitarianism as long as people's thoughts are secret. That doesn't change the fact that at a practical level many nations do have this style of government.

Excellent idea

[MindPrison]

Why wait?

I say pull out...

[Geldon]

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.

Re:I say pull out...

[MightyMartian]

Maybe it's finally struck them that getting into a market under the claim that somehow censored search results will set people free was completely absurd.

Re:I say pull out...

[Monkeedude1212]

Especially since they've determined the target of the attacks were the gmail accounts of human rights activists.

Doesn't it seem just a LITTLE odd that the Chinese government would want this information, Google knows someone wants this information, and the attack originated in China?

I don't blame them for threatening to pull out, its likely that whoever attacked Google was on some form of Chinese government payroll. Over or under the table.

Re:I say pull out...

[bcmm]

Having the search engine available, and notifying people that results have been removed, is probably better than simply not making it available, leaving people using engines which don't tell them when stuff has been censored. They've also done much better than others such as Yahoo!, who keep data in China and actively help the authorities track down dissidents.

Re:I say pull out...

[DrGamez]

This is like going to the snackbar at a movie theater and demanding that they sell steak and lobster otherwise they are censoring you and blocking your freedoms. The hacking is an unrelated issue, China has been hacking everyone for years.

They never sell steak at snack bars. It's not like you're asking for soda and they say they have none, you know there is soda out there but someone is telling the snack bar not to stock it. Steak and lobster? What search engine do you see your movies at?

Re:I say pull out...

[yuhong]

Indeed, if it is indeed true that the Chinese government was so desperate as to going such pains as hacking Google servers to get this info, I am sure it will say a lot about them.

Re:I say pull out...

[galego]

Doesn't it seem just a LITTLE odd that the Chinese government would want this information, Google knows someone wants this information, and the attack originated in China?

Malevolent/Corrupt/Evil ... yet. Odd ... no.

What's the impact?

[hawkeye_82]

I honestly want to know.

What would the impact of Google pulling out of China mean to citizens? How popular was Google, compared to Baidu, Bing, Yahoo, etc. in the Chinese web search space?

Re:What's the impact?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:What's the impact?

[rgo]

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.

Re:What's the impact?

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:What's the impact?

[mr_lizard13]

They're feeling lucky.

Re:What's the impact?

[koxkoxkox]

It is already happening : Youtube, Facebook, Dailymotion, Google groups, Twitter, Blogspot and others are all blocked. The educated Chinese who went abroad already know the extent of the censorship, but what can they do ?

Re:What's the impact?

[metrometro]

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.

So what will happen in practice?

[RDW]

My guess: Google stops censoring itself, gaining credibility for its belatedly 'principled' stand against the Chinese government, while sending a message to China that hacking its servers is Not Polite. China predictably steps in to filter the search results using its own mechanisms, relieving Google of the burden. Google gets to keep its advertising revenue, while the users behind the Great Firewall get (at best) the same censorship as before. Now if Google really wants to make a point, with a genuine and serious risk of losing business, how about making google.cn an exclusively SSL site and seeing how fast China blocks it..?

Re:So what will happen in practice?

[Anonymous Coward]

It wouldn't work. In response to the ability to use google via SSLthe chinese government added URL string scanning to it's list of tools years ago. They could still check people for using banned keywords (and greatly increase the banned list if it is google) and block the specific requests. Google would need to change it's entire infrastructure to no longer pass the keywords in the URL string (even encoding them wouldn't work as they could simply test by entering the strings and then scanning on the resulting URL) It could be done but not quickly, not easily, and it would be expensive as hell

Re:So what will happen in practice?

[Kalriath]

What? The URL string is not available over an SSL connection. Here's a transcript, including headers, of an HTTPS request.

AW#$GAWE$gae3gtraweRGEGaergaweRGTawerGTAWERGTW#trgse3ryg35g

You get the idea. No URI string available. All they could detect is the destination server.

Re:So what will happen in practice?

[wbren]

Not true. The secure connection is established before the HTTP request (containing the URL) is transmitted.

For added irony, I'll refer you to Google.cn for an explanation.

Re:So what will happen in practice?

[gd2shoe]

That's exactly what I was thinking. Most HTTP servers and related software treat GET and POST variables in exactly the same way unless explicitly told not to. I haven't tried a POST request from Google yet, but I'd be very surprised if they don't support it.

Besides, GET should still remain private, as the first thing that happens in an HTTPS connection is the SSL handshake. (BEFORE the URL string is sent) All the government would know is that someone was connecting to google.cn via HTTPS.

Re:So what will happen in practice?

[Anonymous Coward]

That looks like some interesting perl code you have there. What does it do?

Re:So what will happen in practice?

[jmerlin]

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).

Re:So what will happen in practice?

[Spy Hunter]

No, SSL is not vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. The attack you describe only works as an attack on the certificate authority itself. It can only work if the Chinese government possesses the private keys of a CA which is in the default "trusted" list of the user's web browser. If the user knows which CA is compromised in this way, they can remove that CA from their trusted list and the attack will no longer work.

Do you know if any Chinese CAs come preinstalled in popular browsers? I don't think they do.

Re:So what will happen in practice?

[francium de neobie]

Ok.. looks like the mods aren't convinced that the parent's method doesn't work in reality. Maybe I should put it in a more layman's language.

So, what the parent proposed is this... you have a router that pretends to be an HTTPS server between you and https://www.bank.com./ So, when you connect to the website, you're actually negotiating an SSL session with the router while the router negotiates another SSL session with www.bank.com.

This sounds all well and dandy.. except, how can the router in between convince your browser that it isn't really the bank's website?

So the parent's argument is... the organization who owns the router, controls the CA who signed www.bank.com's certificate too. However, even this would give you problems...

1. As I've said, the CA doesn't own www.bank.com's private key - the CA only has its own private key.
2. The guy with the router still has to generate a different private key for generating the crack certificate - knowing the CA's private key doesn't help here.
3. And thus, the crack certificate will end up with e different fingerprint.

Add in the fact that you have plenty of people in China who have found ways to bypass the GFW, and that browsers seeing different fingerprints from the same website's certificates would give out red warning screens, your scheme is already not working well.

Next, it's about the CAs themselves. Every major OS and browser comes with a list of trusted CAs. Do you see many Chinese names there? No? And seeing Green Dam's PR disaster - if the Chinese government bothers to "coerce" foreign CAs to give them private keys, you can guess what the response is.

So, the reality is, even the Chinese government has no way of pulling out the already imperfect man-in-the-middle I described above. Yes, they can still give you a website with a different CA and probably with a self-signed cert, but again any sensible browser would jump up and down about it, which is definitely a strong motivator for anyone interested in privacy to somehow get foreign VPN access or simply just go to a Tor-like network.

Next common question... the textbook version of DH can be man-in-the-middled. While it is theoretically possible to MITM basic non-authenticated Diffie-Hellman without touching all the cert related stuff, it's not really practical since anonymous Diffie-Hellman is disabled by most web servers (e.g. the !ADH SSL cipher suite option in default Apache config) and I think most modern browsers wouldn't allow it anyway. What most real web servers do during SSL key exchange these days is either fixed DH or ephemeral DH, which aren't known to be susceptible to MITM unless the authentication in question isn't meaningful (e.g. self-signed certs, again, which is guaranteed to give you browser warnings)

Re:So what will happen in practice?

[Dwonis]

Most HTTP servers and related software treat GET and POST variables in exactly the same way unless explicitly told not to.

Name three.

The only thing I can think of that still does this is PHP, and only if you use the $_REQUEST variable.

Treating GET and POST the same is broken. For one thing, GET is required to be idempotent, POST is not.

Definitely Pull Out...

[Foobar of Borg]

I mean, we wouldn't want to impregnate China, would we?

Re:Definitely Pull Out...

[girlintraining]

I mean, we wouldn't want to impregnate China, would we?

It's fine, as long as there's only one child from the bastard union.

Google, FTW!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is as close to "do no evil" as they have come in years. Way to grow some balls Google!

Re:Google, FTW!!!

[Tanman]

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.)

Re:Google, FTW!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is as close to "do no evil" as they have come in years. Way to grow some balls Google!

What do you think it would take to get people to quit using that "do no evil" crap? That's a pull quote from the Hippocratic Oath.

Google's motto is "Don't be evil" -- there's a big difference.

Re:Google, FTW!!!

[Andy_R]

http://www.google.cn/search?hl=zh-CN&source=hp&q=tianamen+square+massacre currently gives 1,350,000 results. If it's also doing that on the other side of the great firewall of China, then they have already done something BIG.

Re:Google, FTW!!!

[Marcika]

http://www.google.cn/search?hl=zh-CN&source=hp&q=tianamen+square+massacre currently gives 1,350,000 results. If it's also doing that on the other side of the great firewall of China, then they have already done something BIG.

Ok, now try that with the right spelling of "tiananmen", and you'll see that there's only 41,000 results left... (Not to mention that the most effective part of the Great Firewall is the automatic connection reset for clients where this sort of string is detected in the traffic - which of course only happens inside of China.)

Google Full of Crap

[clampolo]

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.

Re:Google Full of Crap

[abulafia]

Call it PR, or negotiation, or leverage. Fundamentally, it is the same thing at the scale Google is talking about.

Google wants something, and thinks that now is the time to discuss it. I would guess there is more going on than just this hackery. It may well be that what they want is to close down, but I can't imagine, even if they do, that that's the whole of it - they don't seem the sort of company to simply give up on such a huge market in their core markets simply because Baidu out-"competed" them (for values of competition that do include government-level lobbying).

Re:Google Full of Crap

[Psyborgue]

You left off the rest of the quote:

...within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

It could be a PR stunt, but my feeling is that if they were just going to "discuss" it with the chinese they would have kept it behind closed doors. This sounds more like an ultimatum made publicly, and if you say something like that publicly you have to follow through or risk looking like a liar and a hypocrite. Could there be an ulterior motive? Sure. This move will make them very popular outside of China. People like to be on the side of "good" and if a company is seen as sticking up for the oppressed, I can see a lot of people buying their services and products in order to show their support and gratitude.

Re:Google Full of Crap

[dapyx]

They entered the Chinese market in 2006, and, in less than four years, they reached to have 26% of the Chinese market, which, you should remember, is bigger (in numbers) than the US market.

I don't think it's fair to say they were beaten by Baidu.

And the lesson is...

[JoshuaZ]

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.

Re:And the lesson is...

[NeutronCowboy]

Yes. In hindsight, this is all very clear. However, there is a benefit to giving the benefit of the doubt early on: you are positively certain that you did what could be done, and the only option left is stop negotiating amicably. Google now can point to past behavior and say: You're not holding up your end of the bargain. We did. Until we see some change from you, we will ignore your requests. This is a fairly significant position change in negotiations, as you're basically saying that the other party lost all its soft leverage.

There is a similar argument being made in regards to Chamberlain: if he wouldn't have gone the appeasement route first, would the US have actually gotten involved in the War? If it wasn't so blatantly obvious to even the most peaceful of doves that there was no negotiating with Hitler, would the US have been as dedicated to crushing Hitler? Remember that there were plenty of people in the US advocating an isolationist position with regards to Europe, right up until '41.

Failed negotiations are still valuable, because they demonstrate the failure of negotiations.

Re:And the lesson is...

[dangitman]

It's the people that are the problem.

That's OK, we can just get rid of them.

Wow!! Very surprising!

[erroneus]

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.

the issue has been discussed here before:

[circletimessquare]

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

Re:the issue has been discussed here before:

[Saint Aardvark]

score one for human rights

and score one for google's integrity

today is a good day

No kidding. I'll be very interested to see what Yahoo does, especially given their own cooperation with China's secret police.

Re:the issue has been discussed here before:

[Sponge Bath]

does a US company do business with regimes with poor human rights records?

If it is to the company's benefit.

does an internet company help such a government with restrictions on freedoms?

If it is to the company's benefit.

what if the company's motto is "don't be evil"?

Marketing slogans seldom translate to real world actions.

Freedom

[EEPROMS]

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 from marketspeak

[girlintraining]

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."

Re:Translation from marketspeak

[christoofar]

That sentence still has 40% marketease in it.

Here's the Texas-Bubba version:

"We done come over there with our 'quipment and y'alls fucked it up royally and y'all are goin' through allour files. Jesus H. Christ y'all are so batshit I can't see straight. I ain't made dollar to donuts in this place. I'm gonna call Aunt Ethel to see if we can't move back in with the in-laws over in Taiwan."

If it wasn't coming from Googleblog...

[deadhammer]

...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 want access to my logs

[Nicolas MONNET]

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.

Re:I want access to my logs

[D H NG]

You can check to see who've logged into your Gmail account by checking the last account activity link at the bottom of your Gmail screen.

The Cartman Maneuver

[Vyse of Arcadia]

"Screw you guys, I'm going home."

Re:shut it down!

[Saint Stephen]

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?

Re:Wow!! Very surprising!

[Attila Dimedici]

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 government still controls the .cn TLD

[nullchar]

The government still controls the .cn TLD, and they could take over the domain or remove it from the root zone at a whim.

Is it?

[SmallFurryCreature]

Google had a great reputation with its "Do no evil" motto. And then they went into China and they lost it.

What is worth more to google. A great reputation in the west and no business in China, or a sullied reputation in the west and lousy business in China that may be cut off any day when the government chances its mind? You seem to assume like many others that doing business in China is easy, just follow the rules and you make a profit. But that is not the case. You IP is an open target, the government can change the rules whenever it wants and the local competition is heavily entwined with the state.

That makes for a difficult operating environment. It is indeed a brave move by Google to go against the Wall Street mentality of "a penny today" but long term it might be the wisest move they ever make. At least they are sending a signal that there are limits. It seems that at the end of the crisis, something might be changing. Even the US seems to be considering to tax banks... unthinkable in the past. New firms are starting up that claim they will things different and now google being the first to question the Wall Street wisdom that doing business in China is worth everything.

And as for enormous. China only passed Germany this year in exports. The market really ain't all that large. Large parts of it are dirt poor and the rest works for pennies. India is equal in population size and a lot more open. You don't see everyone bending over backwards for India do you? Wall Street loves China, no meddling human rights to upset things, simple rules. But Wall Street has shown it doesn't know shit.

I am frankly surprised at reading this story. Either we soon will get an update that this guy was fired or Google is very serious about this. Because somewhere in China, someone just fainted. The Chinese government does NOT want google to just disappear because of its actions, the average Chinese person doesn't really believe that censorship affects him/her personally. It is just for troublemakers. When google goes (and with that youtube etc etc) it will be noticed far more clearly then some dissident being locked up.

Who knew, Google might actually life up to its motto "Do no evil". Wonder what other companies will do... If Google follows-up on this, MS apologists lost a major piece of ammunition.

Re:Is it?

[sych]

When google goes (and with that youtube etc etc) it will be noticed far more clearly then some dissident being locked up.

I don't know that Google will be missed as much as you think it will be, and foreign websites disappearing from the Chinese internet is a regular enough occurrence that it hardly rates a mention anymore.

YouTube has been gone (blocked) for a year+ now. Same with Facebook, which was blocked just as it was achieving some popularity in China.The average Chinese person doesn't use Google, YouTube or Facebook. They use the local versions: Baidu, Youku and Kaixinwang.

That said, I would prefer to see Google stay in China, even with a little bit of censorship. The Chinese internet is already so disconnected from the internet that we know, but having a player like Google is at least a small bridge over the divide.

Re:Is it?

[gaelfx]

I hate to break it to you, but YouTube has been long gone from the Chinese interweb, as has Twitter, Facebook and numerous other "security risks to the Chinese people," at least in SiChuan, where I live, which is not exactly far from XinJiang. Ever since the race riots, we've lost connection to most of the popular social sites that come from The West and the only people that actually notice this are the ones who actually use Google. You know what most of those people do when they notice that these websites are unavailable? They find something Chinese to watch or read. I really believe that China doesn't *need* Google that much, that there won't be much of an uprising if it disappears and the only people who will be upset about it or left in the water are the ex-pats, who may represent a large portion of Beijing's population, but in no way have any voice to effect any changes here. I see the impact from the West's side of this, but I don't see it changing that much in China.

Re:Is it?

[Rand310]

Youtube is already inaccessible in China and has been for at least 3 years.

Google as a search engine is not particularly interesting to the ordinary citizen in China.

I don't know enough about google's presence in China from their corporate perspective, but from the perspective of someone who lived in China and who works with many Chinese, much more importantly than their google.com, are their backend tools, their technical abilities, their industrial and commercial applications. And I think that is where the strife is taking place, not with the public at large.

While I lived over there I introduced a lot of my friends to gmail and gchat. They provided a means out of the Chinese ecosystem through which they could communicate with friends/others around the world. They liked those tools. I think google's decision may in fact affect mostly those people who are in the know, and have less affect on those who tow the common line.

sounds like a plan

[glebovitz]

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.

Re:sounds like a plan

[Angst Badger]

I'm ready to stop buying Chinese, if possible.

It's not, unless you want to become Amish, and maybe not even then. You'll certainly not be buying any electronics without Chinese-made components.

In any case, boycotts and embargoes mainly harm the little guy who, in a non-democratic society, doesn't get any say in the way things are done. The average Chinese will be thinking about eating his in-laws before any member of the Politburo goes without caviar.

What we should be doing is tying our import tariffs to improvements in Chinese human rights and progress towards democracy instead of blithely rubber-stamping their most favored nation status and pretending that capitalism automatically produces democracy -- which idea always was a load of shit, considering that capitalism was pioneered by monarchies. Democracy tends to produce capitalism, true, but the reverse is not even remotely the case.

careful

[circletimessquare]

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

Google can simply move

[Vinegar Joe]

All of it's Chinese offices to Taiwan. That will really piss off China. And Taiwan is *much* friendlier than China.

Re:Wow!! Very surprising!

[bloodhawk]

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.

Now you're just being silly.

[the Haldanian]

Why would the Iranian Cybercafe Army want to blow up Chinese dissidents? Besides, everyone knows it was the Illuminati.

culture is an addendum to humanity

[circletimessquare]

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

Re:culture is an addendum to humanity

[NeutronCowboy]

You're missing a key concept: the idea that the group, and, more importantly, the nation, is more important than the individual. Remember the story of the guy who fell/jumped into a Panda bear enclosure in China, and got mauled as a result? In the US, the guy would be suing the zoo. In China, the guy apologized for having disturbed the bear, and said that it was an honor to have been mauled by a national icon.

Crazy, right? No. That's par for the course in China.

I do strongly believe that the reason the West kicked China's butt at the turn of the last century was because we had the Enlightenment period, and its huge growth spurts, behind us. However, that has no bearing on whether human rights declared in the human rights charter are fundamental or not. After all, even in the US, people are quite happy to suspend human rights if someone is suspected of being a terrorist.

Re:Wait, "Evil"?

[shutdown -p now]

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).

Re:ain't gona happen geeks and girls

[Ash-Fox]

largest market in the world, and you think they will just walk away?

Might be the largest amount of people, but likely not receiving the largest amount profit from.

Diplomacy 101

[TiggertheMad]

Which in turn means that there might be something else at play.

Reading some of the news coming out about hackers in China, I get the impression that there might be unofficial sanctioning or sponsorship by the government of some Chinese hacker groups.

It also strikes me as a little off that a company announces it 'might' pull out of a country. Usually, these decisions are made internally and press conferences are called to either announce or deny that something is going to happen. If you are a company like Google, you don't openly call the government for hacking and spying. I wonder if this is Google telling the government that it won't put up with their shit?

Re:Diplomacy 101

[Anachragnome]

"I'll see your extortion and raise you a blackmail."

"I'll see your blackmail and raise you illegal detention and torture."

"Fold. Can I get a fucking drink in this place or do I have to go to Taiwan for that too?"

Now there's a thoughtful response

[AmElder]

Who is this "them" that you hate? The country as a whole? The internet users? China's government? There are more than a billion people in China, do you hate all of them individually? Does your hate include children, open source programmers, priests, movie makers, democracy activists, camel drivers, nurses, day care workers, bicycle repairmen, and secretaries for local government?

Do you hate the Chinese language? I hear it's hard to learn. How about Chinese culture? China has a rich tradition in the visual arts and one of the world's great literatures extending back more than 2000 years. Do you hate Chinese sports? Did Ding Junhui beat one of your favorite snooker players this season?

Perhaps you hate the Chinese government including the party old guard and reformers. You must really despise those who wish they were serving their fellow citizens with a transparent, accountable, representative government.

The NY Times cites James Malvenon as saying this is a new development in the practice of cyber warfare. Your jingoistic response suits the context of war perfectly. This was a bad move by someone in China and could hurt everyone involved. To paraphrase Ken Waltz, there's no victory in war, just degrees of defeat.

China will gradually become a fully participating member of the international community. Who that will benefit remains to be seen, but one way or another it's going to happen. It is bad news that as the Chinese government stretches its muscles and experiments with its growing power that it engages in this kind of aggression against private foreign companies. However, something to notice: this story is about China's domestic politics and controlling internal dissent, not about any international conflict. This is why everyone outside China has a stake in the rights and freedoms enjoyed by Chinese citizens and the Chinese state's strict limits on those freedoms. The importance of a country's internal affairs to the world as a whole might remind you of global attitudes toward another economic powerhouse on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.

Re:Google NOT hacked!

[Paradigm_Complex]

Maybe the full intent of the hack was not reached, but the fact is - as you so kindly presented - unauthorized access to *some* information was successful, such as reading the subject line of an unspecified number of emails. Accessing things like that - even if it's not everything - without authorization is a hack (or crack, if you want to be pedantic).

The subject lines of a few emails may very well be enough proof to result in certain human rights activists disappearance. Consider:

Fw: Re: increasing world awareness of china govt crimes against humanity

Google was hacked, Mr. Coward.

Adobe one of the other cyber attack targets?

[naz404]

Looks like Adobe could have been one of the other said targets in the cyber attack. Adobe was just issued this press release today:

Adobe Investigates Corporate Network Security Issue
http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2010/01/adobe_investigates_corporate_n.html
Posted by Pooja Prasad on January 12, 2010 3:16 PM

Adobe became aware on January 2, 2010 of a computer security incident involving a sophisticated, coordinated attack against corporate network systems managed by Adobe and other companies. We are currently in contact with other companies and are investigating the incident. At this time, we have no evidence to indicate that any sensitive information--including customer, financial, employee or any other sensitive data--has been compromised. We anticipate the full investigation will take quite some time to complete. We have and will continue to use information gained from this attack to make infrastructure improvements to enhance security for Adobe, our customers and our partners.

Guess what Baidu has already censored?

[Anonymous Coward]

Step #1: Visit www.baidu.com.
Step #2: Search for Google or blogspot.com. Note that both work.
Step #3: Now search for google.blogspot.com.
Step #4: Enjoy your Baidu lockout. You should be able to search again in 5-10 minutes, I haven't timed the duration exactly.

Re:Guess what Baidu has already censored?

[Game_Ender]

Confirmed. This kind of stuff is pretty crazy.

Re:Guess what Baidu has already censored?

[Antiocheian]

Same for googleblog.blogspot.com

Probable reason: ``At the time we made clear that "we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.",,

Re:Guess what Baidu has already censored?

[PhilHibbs]

That's not Baidu, that's the Great Firewall. Try it with any Chinese web site and a dodgy phrase, e.g. http://www.petrochina.com.cn/falungong and you will be locked out of that web site for a few minutes.

A tangibles option

[zogger]

Google has a tangibles option. They could start not emphasizing ads as much as actually selling stuff themselves, ie a super amazon effort. They are starting now with their cellphone, this branching out..and there is nothing stopping them from going on to all sorts of other tangible products, which would make their advertising just a force multiplier instead of an economic end game, even if all they started out with was a profit sharing deal with ad buyers..

Re:A tangibles option

[a_nonamiss]

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.

Blogspot is blocked in China...

[}{@wkmooN]

I work in ShangHai, I can say that many Chinese uses google.cn and most of them can't imagine google pulling out of China...

It's ironic to see that Google chose to post this on blogspot which is blocked in China!

brave new world

[recharged95]

With cyber-economic "wars" being waged between countries (or the haves vs. the have nots), corporate espionage, and multi-national corporation vs. governments, Whatever google's response to these actions from hackers will ultimately start the once touted fracturing of the Internet. Looking at the reason in this scenario, tiered and fragmented networks are coming and here to stay. That in the end, is sad.

Arriving at the obvious can be hard

[SlappyBastard]

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.

Double standards ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google appears to be a proud protector of the gmail accounts of China's Human Rights activists, when it says that "Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.".

Is this the same Google which Hands over IP addresses of activists to Indian Police ?

What about Google Sets Censorship Precedent In India ?

Mumbai Cyber Sleuths are a law unto themselves, ordering Americans around: Mumbai Police Order American to delete Cartoon

Why does Google co-operate so tamely with Mumbai Cyber police ? Why did Google hand over IPs in 2007 entangling an innocent man in the Police web ?

And yet talk of Human Rights in China ? Don't the Indians have Human Rights too ?

Stereotype

[Mr. Underbridge]

Clearly, you've never met an actual Chinese person. Do you honestly think they don't know what's going on? No, they know. They just don't care.

That's not entirely true. Often true, but not entirely.

In college I worked in a research group that was probably 80% Chinese. This was in the late 90s, when Internet as means of exchanging information was somewhat new. We worked shifts together monitoring experiments, which got boring, so naturally all of us swapped stories.

One of our research group was a Chinese visiting scholar, probably in his 40s. An American student asked him what he thought about Tienanmen. At first we thought he didn't understand what we were asking, but then it became clear - he'd never heard of this event. The government had successfully kept it from him.

This being the internet age, we quickly brought up the pictures of the event we're all familiar with now. It was one of the most memorable, but sad, experiences of my life to watch this guy go from denial to disbelief, learning that his government had committed atrocities against its people and covered it up. I can't really express how strongly that interaction affected me.

So unless things in China have changed drastically in the last 10 years - which is possible - China is still somewhat effective at keeping its people in the dark. And from what I experienced with our visiting scholar, there are Chinese people who care very much.

Re:Stereotype

[interskh]

I am a Chinese student.

Thanks to Internet, we Chinese ppl these days could get these information easier than before. We know about these things like Tienanmen event, etc. Well we have some places to share these information(p2p rocks, doesnt it?) As far as i know, most student in my college have knowledges of what happened those years and sometime we chat about that.

Admittedly, there is GFW trying to block some websites. But in the age of Internet, there is really nothing that could block us from the facts.

Re:Stereotype

[amicusNYCL]

Thanks for taking the time to post that.

I for one

[good water]

I for one welcome our new BAIDU overlords.

I'm pretty sure it was an inside job ...

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

It was surely an inside job. Google needs employees in China to manage the operations there. Even if you keep them under control, or if you send trusted employees from overseas, it's a huge hazard. The government in China has a really tight control of the population, and everyone is afraid of the government. I'm pretty sure it was easy for an insider to leak information, and I'm also pretty sure that the government isn't just buying the "yes, we will comply with your filter" response from Google, and is not only constantly monitoring search results, but also getting inside information about how things are being handled.

If you don't make a huge profit out of China, the rest of the world complains about the censorship you agreed to apply at search results, and you are risking trade secrets and being harassed, then the Chinese market isn't so interesting anymore.

If I were in Google's situation, I would gladly let those 300 millions a year go, and just leave China.

This is clearly the work of the Chinese government

[Chardish]

Google gets hit by a hacker attack, and for that reason decides they're not going to do business inside an entire country anymore? This sounds extremely fishy. One of the richest tech companies in the world should have the money and know-how to establish peerlessly good electronic security...

...unless the people going after them are the Chinese government itself, in which case it would be reasonable for Google to believe that they will never have a safe haven for conducting operations in China without risking compromises to their security.

Who else but the government of China has the means (plenty of money), the motive (stopping Chinese human rights activists), and the opportunity (Google's conducting of operations within China) to scare Google this badly?

China a Threat?

[Game_Ender]

And people scoff at those whole point to China as a credible thread to the US. It seems pretty simple, China is playing the game of geopolitical and economic dominance to win. They abide by just enough rules to make the rest of the world look away, turning EU and the US into patsies while China builds their strength. In several decades if technology is not able to meet the growing demands for natural resources and energy China might be too strong for anyone, the US included, to stop them taking what they want by force (whether its overt force or not).

Google Needs Goodwill

[odin84gk]

People are loosing faith in googles 'Do No Evil' claim, especially since they are becoming so big. Go to Google news and type in "Google Monopoly" to see the effect:

Newspapers:
German Justice Minister Criticizes Google 'I See a Giant Monopoly Developing That's Reminiscent of Microsoft'
      http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,671426,00.html
Bloggers:
"I have come to the conclusion that Google has evolved into what economists call a "natural monopoly"."
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/12/28/google_monopoly/
Even the FTC:
http://it-chuiko.com/internet/1887-googles-anti-monopoly-office-is-under-scrutiny.html

Google knows it is under scrutiny. Just look at google trends. http://www.google.com/trends?q=google+monopoly

Now you have the Nexus issue, and Google's name is being drug through the mud. Their name needs some work, and taking care of their biggest black eye will help if it is published widely enough.