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Google.cn Attack Part of a Broad Spying Effort
CWmike writes "Google's decision Tuesday to risk walking away from China (Um, the world's largest Internet market) may have come as a shock, but security experts see it as the most public admission of a top IT problem for US companies: ongoing corporate espionage originating from China. It's a problem that the US lawmakers have complained about loudly. In the corporate world, online attacks that appear to come from China have been an ongoing problem for years, but big companies haven't said much about this, eager to remain in the good graces of the world's powerhouse economy. Google, by implying that Beijing had sponsored the attack, has placed itself in the center of an international controversy, exposing what appears to be a state-sponsored corporate espionage campaign that compromised more than 30 technology, financial and media companies, most of them global Fortune 500 enterprises. The US government is taking the attack seriously. Late Tuesday, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton released a statement asking the Chinese government to explain itself, saying that Google's allegations 'raise very serious concerns and questions.' She continued: 'The ability to operate with confidence in cyberspace is critical in a modern society and economy.'"
That ought to scare 'em.
Come back to us!
Why is the government wasting time with this? Everybody knows what the answer is going to be, the Chinese government is going to deny everything and change nothing. Unless Secretary Clinton is willing to back up those words with some sort of action, they are just a waste of breath.
I read the internet for the articles.
... that what began as a simple web search company is now so large that it is capable of potentially altering the course of international diplomacy.
As a tech community, we are always reading articles about Google, computer security, etc. It's surprising to see one of our hot button topics being picked up by the mainstream and becoming an international diplomatic flap. I'm stunned that Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, has waded into the discussion.
They may lose china, but in the eyes of many, "not being evil" is worth more.
Go Google, make me proud!
The Digital Sorceress
Just because they're a powerful economy, we shouldn't be apologists for them. The Chinese government is corrupt, authoritarian, and oppressive.
"The ability to operate with confidence in cyberspace is critical in a modern society and economy." Well thanks to the likes of Google and Facebook I can hardly do that as is.
Q.E.D.
Everybody seems to walk on egg shells as to not cause friction with China because of the "possible" loss of customers they get access to. I applaud Google for this. Just because China has 1.3 billion people does not make them all good customers. I know a lot of software developers who would rather stay out of China because after the first license is sold, it's pirated and re-distributed by their competitors. So my point, why compromise your ethics for a hostile business environment that might lead to further problems and minimal increase in the balance sheets. Way to go Google!
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
That's because they apparently were able to access a system used to help Google comply with search warrants by providing data on Google users, said a source familiar with the situation, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with the press.
See why leaving back doors open for law enforcement and other Government organizations actually decreases our security?
See why "if you do nothing wrong you have nothing to worry about" is complete utter non-sense?
By making the government's job easier, they've opened up the door to malicious attacks by foreign governments.
The FBI (the whole Executive branch for that matter) and Congress should be ashamed of themselves for their stupidity in ordering such back doors.
The only fear I have for my security is the idiocy of the US Government in "protecting" me.
Morons.
The ability to operate with confidence in cyberspace is critical in a modern society and economy.
But it's not so critical we're going to do give the citizens broad access to strong encryption and authentication, and force vendors to provide secure products with documented source code and APIs, because that would impede our ability to spy on them. The message to China is: We hate competition.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
China is not a powerhouse.
It is growing rapidly but it is a nightmare police state joke.
When the demographic collapse hits all the "miracle" dreams about China will fade.
Their population is ageing rapidly, they have an imbalance of women to men and they have huge internal problems.
Hope they don't piss off china too much, I'd like not to get nuked when I'm at Google I/O in May...
i see countries lining up .. to set up launch pad web sites to support the chinese websites .. I'm sure Canada and France are already courting them ... oops there goes hosts.deny ..
This is going to go down as the biggest piece of corporate "do-gooding" since Henry Ford did the $5 day. I can't even begin to calculate how much Google went up in my mind for doing this. They may have lost a bunch of potential customers, but for what its worth, they've just got me for life.
Whatever their motives, Google did the right thing, and in a big way. I didn't see Microsoft stepping up to the plate like that, Apple didn't step up to the plate like that, and I'll remember that when I choose platforms.
This is my sig.
A not all that reliable source has suggested that stealing emails in the UK may have been done by China as well: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1238638/Chinese-hackers-linked-Warmergate-climate-change-leaked-emails-controversy.html
When it comes to China now-a-days, there are no assumptions other than guilty. How about Google paying Chinese authors fairly for scanning electronic books? This is evil Google using politics to influence business. Google simply cannot compete with Baidu in China. So, go ahead leave China.
Why is the government wasting time with this? Everybody knows what the answer is going to be, the Chinese government is going to deny everything and change nothing. Unless Secretary Clinton is willing to back up those words with some sort of action, they are just a waste of breath.
Because by publicly asking the government to respond, they are making them look like a pack of inept idiots. It tells the rest of the world that they are attempting to spy (still), and doing a bad job of it. Security services globally will probably now be reviewing their intrusion detection procedures, making it more difficult for the Chinese government skript kiddies to make headway toward their goals. It will scare away some companies considering investment in China, slowing their internal ecenomic growth, and costing them money. It is also the first step in the diplomatic process that can lead to condemnations from the UN, sanctions, or even war. Rational states don't simply skip to straight to attacking other states over stuff like this.
The very fact that they have put this in the public realm as opposed to quietly telling the Chinese government that they know what they are doing (which they have been for years) indicates that the next step in the process is being taken.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
a little suspicious that they release this right after all the bad press about nexus one customer support, hmmm?
One fascinating aspect of this story is how Google, just a private corporation, is able to credibly threaten an entire country -- and a near-superpower one, at that! That used to take the kind of might only a government could wield.
No longer.
The web levels everyone -- and I mean EVERYONE -- to one, lowest common denominator: access.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
in during google brings about the next world war and the end of the world within the next two years.
To kick off a speculation thread, off the top of my head:
1) Google sticks to its guns.
A) Google's Internet operations including search and mail along with its Chinese staff are expelled from China.
a) Baidu, citizens and the government live happily ever after. Google lives happily ever after too but elsewhere.
b) This escalates and sparks more of what Hillary started, things heat up and this gets a little crazy in the name of human rights and fighting espionage.
c) The natives become restless and the Revolution will not be Youtubed.
B) The Chinese government says screw it and allows Google to continue doing its thing but uncensored.
a) This will stand as exceptional treatment for Google.
b) Yahoo grows some stones and follows suit sharing the same consequences as Google.
b) The Great Firewall will essentially be dismantled, hoo-ray.
2) Google loses its footing and caves to pressure of the Chinese government and market, resumes censorship.
A) Google loses major face, Chinese officials feel virile.
B) Google still successfully makes their point in spite of backpedaling and does not regret these decisions.
C) Google is unable to recover significant marketshare which Baidu had scooped up in its absence.
Okay that's all I got. I think 1-B-a is the most likely outcome, Google living on in China but uncensored with the Great Firewall and government policies standing and still being enforced for everyone else as the Chinese continue to remain mute about this. Any other outcomes you all can come up with? Lay down some odds too. Let's make this interesting.
Calling out bogus battery capacity claims.
The Chinese are all about assimilation of technology. And most companies are happy to help. Boeing, you want to sell us planes, then you have to build some components here. Bring in your fancy machine tools and expertize.
Conservative, mod down for violating
Oh thats right, Obama and Company caved to China over human rights, including putting the Dalai Lama off just to appease China.
Along comes Google and suddenly we are concerned? What? Google threaten to pull their campaign contributions?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Here comes months of Congressional hearings which will result in yet another bureaucracy with a name along the lines of: The Department of CyberEspionageChildDefendingPatriotAnti-TerroristJusticeBringers
For the love of Ceiling Cat! Put down your poker chips and blow up dolls! Somebody get the big truck! We gotta unclog the tubez!
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
Further reasons the administration might not like what China is doing right now are economic. China ties their currency exchange rate to the U.S. dollar in a way that keeps theirs low relative to ours. This essentially creates a permanent trade imbalance between the exporter (CHina) and the importers (U.S. mostly, also Europe). I hear people say all the time that China owns a huge portion of the U.S. debt and it would be a big disaster economically if they sold that debt. This is incorrect, if the Chinese sold their U.S. debt they'd be doing us a favor because it would depress the value of the dollar and make our manufacturing more competitive. In the past when unemployment has been rock-bottom in the U.S., this wouldn't help us much. Right now it would help our economy a lot to create manufacturing jobs because our unemployment is 10%. Paul Krugman quantified this by saying that China's exchange rate policy amounts to 1.4 million lost jobs in the U.S. The people at the federal reserve and the treasury know this. Ben Bernake himself has been quoted as saying chaiman-speak equivalent for the Chinese are playing with fire.
The conclusion here is that I suspect that if Clinton is mentioning this, the administration is planning on using this as leverage to get economic or other concessions out of the Chinese.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
... just next to their own wall!
Contrary to increasingly popular belief, the time when we have no recourse against China has not yet come. Yes, they have sizeable American bond and dollar holdings; that's not exactly a one-sided power relationship. Yes, they're a superpower with a growing economy, beyond the grasp of the kind of "military and aid" diplomacy we exercise in the undeveloped world. That hardly closes down the strategic problem space.
I'm sure China hopes that we will sweep this under the rug, do nothing, and say nothing. But just for a start, going public and forcing China's (and the Fed's) hand at this point starts a discussion about what can be done. It spurs everyone to take security more seriously and think differently about their relationship with China. It aids, in sometimes complex and inscrutable ways, in the difficult negotiations with China that many businesses and parts of the government must engage in regularly. It reframes discussions about political, defense, and economic issues.
To put it in perspective, and maybe make yourself feel a bit better, you can crack open the news archives and history books for a look back at American espionage, dirty tricks, corporate/3-letter government agency joint ventures and international "development" over the these many years. We generally give as good as we get.
Domestic business is governed by laws (in the developed world, at least). International business is often governed by politics at best, and by the law of the jungle at worst.
Tired of Political Trolls? Opt Out!
Who would you rather be?
A. An idiot, with a big gun and lots of money, whos paying your rent for you.
or
B. The renter with no money, who is smart and has a gun but it's locked away and you can't find the key and is scared to use it.
Can't believe people still fall for the naive "Don't be evil" motto these days.
It may shock you, but corporations are made of people, and sometimes, the people that make them up are moved to do ethical things. That Google's actions are newsworthy is a reflection on us, not just an abstraction of the corporation.
This is my sig.
Indeed it's true. I see many people talk of fearing China, but the reality is it simply doesn't have the military equipment to fight far from it's shores, it doesn't have the stability to guarantee that if it does send it's soldiers outside it's borders that it wont lose territory to dissidents inside it's borders. Contrary to popular belief it doesn't have that much support from Russia, partly because it's still locked in border disputes with them, the same goes for it's other neighbours in almost every direction who would love the opportunity of China spreading itself to far to claim territory they believe is their own.
Economically it could certainly be a problem, but in terms of us losing it's manufacturing facility the likes of India which is of a similar population would gladly pick up the slack, and in the current weakened economic situation in fact, most countries would be willing to take on a big manufacturing boost.
That's not to say they couldn't be a problem at all of course, if they backed up North Korea by having North Korea threaten further to launch nukes whilst providing them military support to try and wave of the US and such from attacking it in response to such threats it'd be a big deal. Similarly any war with them would still be a hell of a headache, but the point to take away is this, no matter what China does, even if in the worst case they decide to pursue a military route, whilst they'd cause a lot of harm and damage, they'd have absolutely no chance of winning. Even their nuclear stockpile is relatively small, particularly when you take into account modern American ICBM defences.
In a way though it's a real shame, because China has so many smart people, it has such potential to be a thriving peaceful modern nation. It's perhaps ironic that the lust for power and control at the top of China is exactly what stops China from becoming a more powerful player on the international stage. It has a big population, but it can't unilaterally take on the world despite seeming to believe otherwise.
Google's post states that the target of most of the hacking they intercepted are chinese dissidents and human rights activist. Corporate espionage is bad, yes, my heart goes to all those executives whose companies will lose $$$s, but there are more important issues at stake, the lives and freedoms of people who want to be free.
but a big american company gripes and all of a sudden the secretary of state wants the Chinese to explain themselves.
Absolute statements are never true
Late Tuesday, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
Who?
released a statement asking the Chinese government to explain itself, saying that Google's allegations 'raise very serious concerns and questions.'
Ah, strongly worded statements. The stuff of international ACTION! That'll learn 'em.
She continued:
Why?
'The ability to operate with confidence in cyberspace is critical in a modern society and economy.'"
China: Huh? Wha? You talkin' to me? What? Meh... (goes back to whatever it was doing)
Hillary: Don't make me wag my finger at you!
China: You're so cute when you think anyone cares! LOL!
...when to pull out of a country?
When piracy, spying and stealing are so rampant no known economic principles can be applied to it.
This is a backdoor because the obvious way to store search data is to aggregate it immediately and delete the source. Which is what any sane engineer would do.
Enter the cops: Don't delete that data, I might want to spy on someone. What do you mean China is using that data to spy on someone? How dare they!
And that's why it's a back door.
What is this, 1998? Is anyone outside of the government still using the term "cyberspace"?
Unless I'm actually in the business of trading with the Chinese, can anybody give me one good reason not to drop all traffic from their IPs right at the router?
I don't think I'd miss anything from there except spam. I bet many Fortune 500 companies wouldn't either, and if they had a business unit that needed to communicate with China, they could set up a special link for that. The rest of your network doesn't need access.
It's kind of a step backwards to have to think about national borders on the 'net; but if they're going to behave this way, that has a cost. We'll just go back to a "placing a call there requires some extra code and expense" mentality.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
From the Google blog, I am not really sure why Google wants to re-think the understanding they had with the Chinese govt. Google has not directly made an allegation that the gmail accounts of the human rights activists was hacked by the Chinese govt.
When a thief sees a saint, all he sees are his pockets!
Let's fight back. I bet half their shit could be taken down too. Oh wait - I'd have to learn Mandarin. Nevermind.
Only Google could leave China.
Spy sappin mah .cn-tree!
Back in 2001 I was working for state government. Our web site was defaced and I started tracing the sources through our border routers, etc. It resolved back to China.
So I did what any sane administrator in government would do, I just blotted out the known IP ranges from China.
... they can do whatever the hell they want.
"Google's decision Tuesday to risk walking away from China (Um, the world's largest Internet market)..."
They're not REQUIRED to do business with anyone. Some customers are just too much of a pain in the ass to be worth it. Imagine you own a store and there's an item you buy for $5 and sell for $10. If someone comes in and offers you $9 for it, would you sell? Sure, why not, it's still pretty good. How about $8? $7? $6? $5.50? $5.25? $5.05? $5.01? At what point do you tell them "Piss off, you're wasting my time"? I personally would much rather deal with a thousand nice well-off customers than a million pain-in-the-ass cheapskates.* Seems to be working pretty well for Apple too. :-)
So same thing here. If Google doesn't feel like dealing with China's BS, they don't have to. Let someone else try to make a buck off that headache.
* disclaimer: before anyone gets their panties in a knot, I'm not saying rich people are nice and poor people aren't. I'm talking about CHEAPNESS here--someone who has nothing better to do with their time than argue over every nickel versus someone who's content to pay a fair price. Cheapness** is why the US is so beholden to China right now. See also Schmatta.
** and a few other things
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
When has UN condemnation ever acomphished anything?
Even if the condemnation doesn't scare off investors (Which China wants and needs), it is the next step in the process. International diplomacy is a game with rules.
Who exactly woud sanctions against China hurt? (Hint: not China)
Yes it would actually hurt China. They need markets to sell to. While it wouldn't also cause other short term pain, it would allow development of markets in other countries, eroding China's long term markets. China is not the only game in town by a long shot.
Who is going to declare war on a country with over a billion people and manufacturers most of all but the most secretive millitrary hardware for just about the rest of the world?
Again, China is not the only market, especially for military hardware. While China is a powerful country, it cannot stand alone against the world. While warfare isn't on the table yet, China will not be able to behave like this indefinitely without suffering repercussions.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
The thought was, China will suffer a major loss of prestige if Google goes through with this. Other companies will follow suit, leading to loss of access, loss of influence, loss of opportunity, and ultimately, loss of business.
China will lash out with wounded national pride, as they seem wont to do. This will further alienate them from the international community, leading to further loss of status.
Loss of prestige will encourage civil unrest, something China dreads. In some places, China seems to be a tinderbox, just waiting to catch fire. They are suffering from the global recession just as much as anyone.
That is a whole lot of pain that China doesn't need right now.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Let's borrow their model of firewalling the world's corruption out: the rest of the world should form a great firewall blocking them in!
I got so fed up with the constant hack attempts coming from China that I just ended up writing firewall rules that basically DROP any packet with a source address in China. Can they get around it? Yes. Will they bother? Probably not - they'll just move on to a server that responds.
When I say constant, I mean it. My servers were under a constant barrage of brute force ssh login attempts, old apache and php hacks, etc. If my logs were a fan I could have powered a Florida flatboat. Now that the firewall and all my routers DROP all chinese packets, the logs are pretty quiet.
Re: Administration's new encryption policy.
Date: September 28, 1999.
Weldon statement.
Free USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand!
CIA slipped bugs to Soviets
conspiracy!!!!! rabble rabble rabble conspiracy!!
Whether you think Google's initial decision to comply with censorship in China is right or not, I think their decision now makes the initial compliance worthwhile. With it Google now has enough influence to the Chinese that the news is big enough to spread to everyone in China. (Remember it doesn't matter how much we know, more important is how much the Chinese citizen get from this news) Google also has enough market share that its retreat can greatly disrupt existing market.
Although there are certainly still a lot of ignorant PRC Chinese that pissed me off, I am very glad to see a lot of PRC Chinese that appreciate Google and disagree with the censorship in China. Many of them know about sensitive incidents like tiananmen. I believe thanks to the "negative" effect of the great censorship effort by the government, some younger Chinese become more aware of such incidents by actively comparing search results of these incidents whenever censorship related news are reported.
I'm quite surprise to not see any Slashdot comment mentioning this. Within moments the news were reported, large amount of visitors are attracted to Google China's headquarter to present "illegal" flowers to Google. The new term "fei1 fa3 xian4 hua1" (Slashdot can't accept my chinese character) is used and no surprising, this term has been banned by Baidu et al. There isn't much you can see from the English Google News, but with the chinese keyword, you can get much more informative results.
(disclaimer: I'm a Chinese but not from PRC)
Yeah, I'm sure China will be as damaged by their 'collapse' as we have been by ours.
China is a powerhouse whether you like it or not. China has been the cultural, political, and economic epicenter of the largest continent on earth for the better part of five thousand years. Almost every society near China is directly derivative of Chinese society. China contains nearly 20% of the world's entire population. They will be second only to the US in GDP very shortly. China is second only to the US in military expenditures, and has nearly 1 million more active duty military personnel than the US (sobering considering that the US could not defeat China in any of the proxy wars it has fought in Asia). Ask the Germans or the French how well technological superiority works against vast numbers and huge territory in a conventional war. And while I'm not one of the nutjobs who think war with China is around the corner, if their economic growth falters and it destabilizes their society, they may change their approach to a more aggressive one regionally to rally nationalism, perhaps even to the point of provoking a war with India over Arunchal Pradesh or trying to absorb Taiwan.
China is a police state, even a nightmare, but if you think China is a joke you might find that the punchline is not so funny.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
We buy any old shit, no matter if they make some of the parts here.
Blar.
And start blocking Chinese IP Blocks?
I have been carving large blocks of Chinese owned IP blocks and putting them into the iptable INPUT DROP. Why? Because 90% of ssh probing have been from those IP addresses. If this keeps up, China won't need a Great Firewall since more and more people will just refuse to peer with them.
"But with the revelations that there have been major cyber attacks aimed at human rights activists, both in China and in the West, it's hard to see how Google could have remained silent."
Actually it's not hard at all. They could have just kept doing business as usual, like most big companies. My hat's off to Google management for remembering that they're human beings first and business people second.
"Projection of Power" is instrumental in any modern military operation. The U.S. leads in this catagory by far. The classic symbol of POP is the aircraft carrier.... U.S. 11, China 1 (although there are reports of 2 others)
you mean "couldn't outcompete Baidu", then you'd be right. Google is taking its ball and going home because they lost to Baidu. Watch Google pretend to be in favor of "human rights" when the issue is just that they lost in a capitalistic competition.
On a related note Hillary Clinton is an irrational China-hater. Watch Obama have to discreetly disavow what she says and end up making it up to us. If you want to actually get anything done with us rather than just pontificate for the sake of pleasing the China-hating segment of the electorate, then keep Hillary out of it.
Where Chinese government has to hack their way in, US govt agents simply show up and asks for disclosure. I don't think they even need a warrant for that.
In what ways are Communists more evil?
That's a long way from a corporation challenging a superpower. It's also awfully speculative. Google doesn't have as much to gain by operating in China as others do, and their particular business makes it quite a bit more difficult to do so.
Do you really think the west's appetite for cheap stuff made by cheap labor in China is going to dry up? A company ordering product from China doesn't have to do any complicated filtering or anything, and there is considerable incentive for them to keep doing business with China.
Gotta love USA jingoist crap like this. Look, China fought the combined USA-UN forces to a standstill in North Korea two generations ago. China's relatively smaller ICBM force is still sufficient to annihilate civilisation (go nukes, yay), and China's new anti-ship ballistic MIRV deployment has neutralised any force projection capability by the US Navy near China for at least ten years.
You really don't appreciate the extremely low quality of conversation here until there's a subject you have first hand information about and then you track it on Slashdot.
Once you remove the trolls, flames, childish sniping, political rants, and ravings of amoral anarchists, the remaining 1% is just plain wrong.
I know this is Slashdot. But once up a time, the ratio of anything-worth-reading to shit was much better. This may as well be a Foxnews blog commentary or Yahoo group. Even the NYT comments section is carrying a better ratio of informed conversation to crap (~1:50)
I guess gen X moved on and gen Y (Z, AA, etc.) moved in. Oh well...
I say we block China at firewalls and routers:
http://www.iblocklist.com/list.php?list=cn
Basically, any nation that starts a nuclear war against either the USA or Russia, without being able to win a decisive victory, loses everything. If they manage to destroy say, 30, 40, or even 50% of either superpower's population and assets, they just provide the justification for an absolutely overwhelming retaliatory strike.
Remember US history for the 1940's. The US declares war on Japan, with an immediate demand for unconditional surrender, and publicly announces that this is the only thing they will accept. The War declaration in Congress makes this a binding matter on the executive branch, that the US will not accept a conditional surrender except by direct order of the President.
The following are a few of the publicly expressed remarks of the time, generally approved by the majority of Americans listening:
"By the time we're through with them, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell."
"I hate Japs! I'm telling you men, that if I met a pregnant Japanese woman, I'd kick her in the belly!"
Both by Fleet Admiral William "Bull" Halsey
You'll note that Halsey is quite clearly talking Genocide as an acceptable response. He got promoted after that.
During the 70's the Soviet Union conducted top level strategic simulations exercises (sit around a table style war games scenarios) with its general staff. One of the noted outcomes of those was that, whenever scenario casualties exceeded the roughly 20 million from WW2, someone on the staff spotted and mentioned that fact, and commanding generals and admirals almost invariably swiftly urged the politbureau to immediately allow retrofitting of cobalt jackets on nuclear devices and permission to deploy them specifically against civilian population centers, or the release of weaponized smallpox or anthrax to the front lines for field artillary use, or other such acts. The Soviet Union's analysis was that, in a real war, once casualties reached about 20 million, there was a better than 50-50 chance command would stage a coup if civilian authorities didn't approve all the most extreme measures in the Soviet arsenal, and an even higher likelihood they would give orders to totally exterminate the enemy population bases with them if they got the means to do so. Whether they would have been so determined to take it into runaway mode in a real war is, of course, speculative, but there's certainly at least some chance.
Who is John Cabal?
Arm the photon torpedos...
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Gone in china!
Check out http://www.youtube.cn
President Hu Jintao: "Ogh! You must have very big pee-anis!"
President Obama: "Excuse me? I was just asking you what you’re up to with these cyber attacks on America Companies!"
President Hu Jintao: "Nothing. We are very simple people. With very small penis. This hacker's penis is especially small."
Chinese Hacker: [fakes a sob] "Uh, smuh, so small."
President Hu Jintao: "We cannot achieve much with so small penis. But you! Americans. Wow! Penis so big! SOOO big penis!"
President Obama: [flattered] "Well uh, he—I guess it is a pretty good size."
Chinese Hacker: "Minata, kite kite!" ["Everone, come come!" A group of Japanese women move in, chattering] "This-a man has veh-ry big penis!" [the women applaud]
Woman 1: Take takeru o da ne? ["It’s rather large, isn’t it?"]
Woman 2: Hai. ["Yes."]
Chinese Hacker: "Uh, hoh, what an enoah-mus penis-uh!"
?
So the Chinese government successfully got you to censor your site from its citizens?
HEY!! Scwoo you wound-eye!! You mama cook fish! HA HA HA!!
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I am proud of Google for telling China to piss off. The US government hasn't been able to do this for years because they are afraid of losing the cheap Chinese imports, even though it is decimating our economy.
Judging how Chinese culture treats IP, I would imagine it's hard to say whose derivative of whom! Truly a scholarly culture historically though, albeit with an "edited" history. Scholars need "grants", of course.
Further, I think your analysis of the military abilities of china is somewhat limited. Could be wrong, but armies march on their stomachs. And they can't march across the ocean, or the air.
I also would not expect a "vintage" conventional war whatsoever. Proxy wars more likely, but depends on how China tries to access the resources it already needs to have had yesterday.
CAN HAZ SECRETS TOO?
Echelon is a sigint system, designed to eavesdrop. Not intrude. At least so far as we know.
There IS a difference.
It's one thing to tap every cable, listen in on every conversation, and save what you think is interesting.
It's even another thing to get your taps from the various carriers (be it voice or data) just for the asking, and get denials from them no matter what.
But Google is accusing the Chinese government of aiding, supporting, or even sponsoring INTRUSIONS into corporate and other networks, with the intention of gaining access to email accounts and other services. I won't yet accuse them of actually performing the attempts.
The NSA is not a benign little organization, but Echelon doesn't try to crack your Gmail account. It just wants a copy of your mail. Which is trivial.
These Chinese attempts are overkill for just surveillance. More likely, these attempts are intended to disrupt, deny, or hijack accounts and services to discredit or hinder those users.
And the commercial stuff is no surprise, Chinese sources have been whacking away at systems worldwide for some time now. Hillary is just obeying protocol in the face of a government that clearly doesn't care, but in a world that does. She doesn't really have the ^&9(s to follow up the threats, but that's not State's job anyways. We have a military as one option, spooks as the best option, and of course ISPs could be prepared to start filtering Chinese traffic. Which will just make them rent servers somewhere else to do the job. Whack-a-mole. Nasty business, and time-consuming. Might not succeed.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
The morality of the market Is easily reflected in Google's stock price. I think this is why Google is still privately controlled instead of at the whim of the shareholders, or as I like to call them, the greedy ancient Court of Douchebags.
Google Inc. (GOOG, $580.93, -$9.55, -1.62%) said it may leave China after an investigation found the company had been hit with major cyber attacks it believes originated from the country--a move that would amount to one of the highest-profile rebukes yet of China by a major U.S. firm. The talk tossed China's Internet economy into turmoil, and sent Chinese search company Baidu ($431.67, +$45.18, +11.69%) soaring. Deutsche Bank upgraded the company to buy from hold saying Google threat is likely a plus for Baidu no matter how it shakes out. Other Chinese Internet firms also rose, including Sohu.com Inc. (SOHU, $58.98, +$0.85, +1.46%) and Sina Corp. (SINA, $44.87, +$0.30, +0.67%).
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20100113-708147.html?mod=WSJ_World_MIDDLEHeadlinesEurope
Yup. I've often been of the opinion that if the Chinese government either can't get its act together or continues to sponsor what I term a form of terrorism, we should just push to cut their net connection completely.
Of course that would play into the governments hands. Then they'd have the ultimate control of information.
But I was just responsible for a state web site, not a federal web site. So no harm, no foul.
You're probably right. Then again, we are talking about a country that feels the need to filter what every single person in the whole blessed country reads every moment of every day on the Internet...
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
DMCA? DoD?
Free USA!
FREE Canada!
Free Australia!
Free New Zealand!
You have heard of proxies right?
Actually sometimes it just takes someone to be first to quit, just like it takes someone to be first to jump in.
The business is not worth the requirements, other industries may take a second look.
For instance
Toy manufacturers burned by recalls of leaded toys.
pet food makers burned by customer's pets dying from poisoned pet food.
Software, music, and movie producers having product pirated (on the mass production scale).
Electronics makers having products copied and sold or even counterfeited.
It doesn't mean companies will stop getting stuff made cheaply. Just not cheaply in China There are a number of other places cheaper then the US or Eastern Europe to outsource to without the number of problems that come up with China.
The fact that Google has the balls to stand up, lay out some demands (not going to censor), and be the first to potentially pull out sure does seem like challenging a superpower
Don't be so sure: the US is probably why indymedia's servers got pinched. To catch a citizen of another country that was speaking against the G7.
And the US (just as the US are accusing China of doing now) is spying on conversations over the internet between competing foreign countries.
Judging how Chinese culture treats IP, I would imagine it's hard to say whose derivative of whom!
There is no debate that China is the root from which most of Japanese, Korean, and Indochinese culture (writing, language, cuisine, art, music, architecture, etc. etc.) is derived. Your attempt at an IP joke is anachronistic and doesn't have enough basis in real history to have meaning.
Further, I think your analysis of the military abilities of china is somewhat limited. Could be wrong, but armies march on their stomachs.
Didn't seem to be a limiting factor in Korea or Vietnam.
And they can't march across the ocean, or the air.
Uh... really? Are you kidding me?
I also would not expect a "vintage" conventional war whatsoever. Proxy wars more likely, but depends on how China tries to access the resources it already needs to have had yesterday.
I agree, conventional war is unlikely, but remember that the PRC has succeeded in all its proxy wars in Asia. The US has not.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Interesting. In 2001 I took a job at a major hospital and the first thing I found was that the new web servers had been hacked by a group calling itself "sysadmen@yahoo.cn" It was a script kiddie attack (and the folks who installed those servers ought to be ashamed for the way they set them up). I'm not a security expert but I reported the breach and fixed security on those servers.
China has been doing this for a long time, and they are getting good at it.
f u cn rd ths u cn gt a gd jb n cmptr prgmng
BING forms exclusive partnership with Chinese government.
Okay, maybe not now that Google has got the Secretary of State in on this debacle, but I wouldn't put it past 'em.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Another one who seems to think he can win a nuclear war with China. Look: You nuke China all to hell + China nukes you all to hell = HELL. No one wins. Not even America behind its "modern ICBM defences"...
Anyway, I can't actually remember China say they're going to "unilaterally take on the world". For now they seem content just to take on the world's manufacturing.
http://ihatehate.wordpress.com
Once you remove the trolls, flames, childish sniping, political rants, and ravings of amoral anarchists, the remaining 1% is just plain wrong.
I think that percentage varies depending on the subject and quantity of knowledge surrounding it. China represents a fairly dark spot on the public awareness.
In any case, the idea is that when you have information that others do not, you share it so that everybody is able to step out of the mire of ignorance if they choose.
But it doesn't work if you don't participate.
Yes, there is a lot of fluff and uneducated opinion around here, but there is also a hunger for hard information. The only real trick is navigating all the ego traps; Egos do not like to think of themselves as lacking, but so what? That's a pandemic situation across all of humanity.
So put your cards on the table. What's the situation with China wrt Google and the internet as you see it?
-FL
The US government shows up with a warrant for a user. Google gives them access.
Google set up a server so the Chinese government could show up with authorization and get access to a user's information.
The Chinese hacked into that server, either because waiting for authorization was too much of a bother, or because they wanted to go on a fishing expedition.
"Uh... really? Are you kidding me? "
HAH!
They have to get across the Pacific Ocean first.
And how does the Chinese navy match up to that of the US?
BTW... What such proxy wars has China been in within the last 50 years?
I don't think you realise how few nukes China has and also overestimate the size of a nuclear explosion as many people often do.
The only two countries in the world that can unilaterally push the no one wins scenario are Russia and the USA. Other nuclear capable nations simply do not have enough weapons of high enough yield setup to be deployed via the harder to take down ICBMs to fulfil that scenario. They could do a lot of damage for sure, they could whipe out the entire Eastern seaboard of the US, the vast majority of Europe and so forth, but here's the key, if they did either of those you'd still have either Europe left, or the entire rest of the US and it's allies, or a combination of that would strike back. The US would still have facility to whipe out the whole of China via ICBMs in response. My point is, that in a worst case scenario China could not end the world or anything so daft, they could not even end the West, and their price for only heavily damaging it would be their own entire obliteration. China has at most 180 nuclear weapons, of these many are only deployable from shorter range launchers or aircraft, which would be easy for the US to defend against. Of the handful that are ICBMs, many aren't particularly high yield. This is why as I state, China's nuclear capacity is limited far below anything approaching complete worldwide obliteration. In contrast, again, only the US and Russia have enough ICBMs to whipe the world out a few times over.
"Anyway, I can't actually remember China say they're going to "unilaterally take on the world". For now they seem content just to take on the world's manufacturing."
No neither can I, but then, though that's probably because I was quite clearly talking about a hypothetical worst case scenario if things ever really did get that crazy, which I don't believe they honestly ever will.
How can we develop our online business when even governments hack websites? They should fight cybercrime, not participate in it.
Ask the Germans or the French how well technological superiority works against vast numbers and huge territory in a conventional war.
I'm not sure why you'd ask the Germans, since they were never in such a situation (if you meant to imply WW2, then you're incorrect, as Soviets had technological superiority in quite a few things early on, such as tanks).
As for the rest of it, it depends on the goals of any such conventional war. Occupying and holding ground would be impossible, true, but you don't really need that to remove a threat to yourself unless the country directly borders yours; if it doesn't, you just thoroughly bomb it to cripple its infrastructure, and thus setting it back severely.
"They walk on egg shells because China is the largest nuclear threat since the USSR "
That, and China can stop making our underpants.
I don't know about you, but that second threat scares me more.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Sure... Of course tech did seem to help during the Opium Wars... both of which were lost by China.
China can be beaten in warfare... The Sino-Japanese conflict also demonstrated that fact.
China is not as homogeneous as some would have us believe, and they are one farmer's revolt away from dissolving into internal conflict, as they have many times during their millenia in existence. Even then, during those millenia the primary ruling influence flowed from a subculture or family or political power.
Their not a joke... but they aren't as mighty as many people seem to think that they are.
Someday maybe... but not today.
two Trident subs & a couple hundred MIRV ICBM's and that's the end of them (all of them). There will be no "conventional" conflict.
Only a Great Wall Of Glass!
I don't agree with the assertion that since most attacks originated from China, it _MUST_ be the Chinese government doing. Most spam originated from the US, does it means that the US government are doing the spamming? Surely not. I think most hackers have most luck in hijacking the servers in China due to lack of technology over there.
The Bering Strait is only about twice as wide as the English Channel at the respective narrowest of each, and the Normandy invasion took routes in excess of the distance across the Bering Strait. And for the precedent of open sea operations you have then entire Pacific theater of operations in WW2, or did you forget about that? Both the Japanese and US forces waged (alternatingly) successful campaigns from Indonesia to Alaska to the Solomon Islands.
As for the last 50 years... remember that little conflict called Vietnam? Do you really think that the NVA and NVC could have stood up to the US without the support of the PRC? (And there was a lot more of it than official records are ever going to admit.)
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Where do you get those numbers?
From the CIA world factbook, 2008 est. ( https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2001rank.html )
1. European Union, 14.9 trillion
2. United States, 14.4 trillion
3. China, 7.9 trillion
"Yeah, I'm sure China will be as damaged by their 'collapse' as we have been by ours."
When all their rivers are polluted and their crops tainted with industrial effluent... they're probably going to be worse off.
Industrialisation is great and all, but converting all planetary biomass into iPods does surprisingly have a down side. Who knew?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
it simply doesn't have the military equipment to fight far from it's shores,
Has it ever occured to you that they simply have no interest in that? The US inherited the history of Europe, a colonial power structure. To us, the ability to propagate military force somewhere (and, if possible, anywhere) is what matters.
Asia's history is very different. To the chinese, pretty much everything that mattered for the past 5000 years has happened in China. Why would you want to go and fight somewhere else? The trivial answer would be that the chinese army is a defensive army, but that's too simplified. What really happens is that China is already so large that there is no point in further conquest. It's one of the few nations on earth that doesn't want or need expansion, so it doesn't want or need an army that can operate far outside its borders.
even if in the worst case they decide to pursue a military route, whilst they'd cause a lot of harm and damage, they'd have absolutely no chance of winning. Even their nuclear stockpile is relatively small, particularly when you take into account modern American ICBM defences.
It all depends on your definition of "winning", right? From what little I know, China is about the only place on the planet that has a reasonably good chance of actually defeating a US invasion force. The US ability to project its force largely rests with the carrier groups, and China has acquired specialized low-flying nukes for that specific target. Let's see the US military after it's lost three carrier groups.
If by "winning" you mean "conquering the USA", then I point to my first part: What tells you they have any desire to do that?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
seperate reply for the non-military part:
It's perhaps ironic that the lust for power and control at the top of China is exactly what stops China from becoming a more powerful player on the international stage.
Yes, and no. There is also the (among experts, at least) widespread opinion that any attempt at a "revolution and democracy" approach would very likely have caused a civil war and claimed millions of victims. Maybe quite a bit of our judgement is due to impatience. The US is what, 230 years old? China is more than ten times that. In chinese terms (and world-view), what does it matter if the process of changing the nation takes a century?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Every time I visit the first link in the article, I get a crash-to-desktop in Firefox 3.0.10, on a Vista non-admin account.
I'm definitely a Firefox power user, and have never experienced this on any machines before. Given the content of the article, this has me a little worried. I've let this box go un-updated browser-wise long enough.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.10) Gecko/2009042316 Firefox/3.0.10 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Yes. In that way China is just like most large corporations. The rest of the world's companies should feel right at home and want to do business there.
Epicenter? for 5000 years? not even close. Just because the chinese calendar goes back 4700 years doesn't mean that they were all important years, and indeed the vast majority of them passed into obscurity along will so many other cultures.
Meanwhile India started earlier, and certainly did NOT derive from chinese culture. The USSR was the political powerhouse for the majority of the last century in Asia, not China. Economic powerhouse status also likey goes to The USSR, but that might actually be up for closer study. "Cultural powerhouse" is a BS term by so many measures that it really doesn't deserve a response.
BTW, India has only a slightly smaller share of the world's population, and China has the clear benefit for supporting sides in Southeast Asia because, oh, PROXIMITY perhaps, amongst hundreds of other non-China-related factors. Lets see China try to take over Canada and we'll see how things go...
China is big, sure, and its scary if your game is to be a crazy militarist type. But its a empire made up of people, just like any other, and no empire will last forever.
There have been quite a few American citizens right here on Slashdot who've posted in response to political stories something along the lines of "well, time to move to Canada."
Would you say they're credible threats to a superpower too?
See below. The recent Chinese coastal ballistic MIRV deployment neutralises any and all US Navy force projections within China's sphere of influence for at least ten years. Given the recent advances in smart MIRV, possession of the world's largest aircraft carrier fleet in 2010 is about equivalent to the world's largest battleship fleet in 1940, or the world's largest ironclad fleet in 1880.
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But I was just responsible for a state web site, not a federal web site. So no harm, no foul.
And even if you were responsible for a Federal-level site ... where is it written that every site operated by a U.S. entity must be visible to people in other countries?
Some years ago AT&T cut its trunk lines to China, because of all the spam coming out of open relays there. The State Department got involved after the Chinese government complained, and AT&T backed off. But this problem is not new, and China's government apparently has no intention of doing anything about it. Why should they? It's just a drain on our economy. Definite plus for them. Personally, I think our government should offer a bounty to U.S. crackers for verified hacks of any computer within Chinese address space.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
China is second only to the US in military expenditures, and has nearly 1 million more active duty military personnel than the US (sobering considering that the US could not defeat China in any of the proxy wars it has fought in Asia).
You bring up some interesting statistics, but I would like to point out that military size hardly means shit if you have to square off against the most powerful damn Navy on the planet. That's not to say that the U.S. could necessarily take or occupy China. However, something that folk seem to forget is that the United States Navy has, effectively, a monopoly on the world's waterways. That's not to say it would go unchallenged. The Soviets gave us a good run for our money back during the Cold War. But it is important to remember just how much of a role a naval force plays in a conflict. Hell, most of the war against Japan in WWII was centered around naval conflicts. Let's not forget the total control over northern seas that the Germans were able to execute with their U boats before America stepped into the fray. During WWII, the United States war machine was capable of turning out (if I recall my numbers from high school correctly) over 500 destroyers a year. That doesn't even include the battleship and aircraft carrier and submarine production that went on. Naval superiority gives you access to your enemies. Unless China or someone else is able to muster a naval force capable of standing toe to toe with the United States, they don't stand a chance in a full on conventional conflict.
Also, before anyone brings up the fact that some colonists overthrew the worlds biggest Navy (British) 200+ years ago, it would be disingenuous to not mention the French. Had the French not helped break the blockade on the colonies, America as we know it today would have never existed. Naval dominance is a key to military strategy. Never forget that.
And just to underscore my point, from wikipedia:
The U.S. Navy is the largest in the world; its battle fleet tonnage is greater than that of the next 13 largest combined.[3] The U.S. Navy also has the world's largest carrier fleet, with 11 in service and one under construction.
If that doesn't deserve a 'Holy Shit' tag I don't know what does.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
What they forget is that there are, in effect, two Chinas. There is the China you hear about in the news, this is the city China, the urban China. This is where people are joining the 21st century, have Internet, and so on. This is where the massive growth is happening. However, when you look at it, you discover this is only in some cities along the eastern seaboard for the most part, What then of the rest of the country? Well, they are peasants. They live a subsistence life, have little to no access to education, healthcare, and so on. They are back in the 19th (or earlier) century in just about every way. Their only way out is to leave and try to make it in the cities, which many do, but many more do not (or cannot).
So it turns out that all those people in China are not equal, they are not all potential customers. China has a MASSIVE class divide, and those on the bottom are not ones with computers, often eve not ones with power. They are not potential customers.
China's large population isn't meaningful currently. You can't compare it to the population of the US or Europe where most people have enough that they are potential customers. Here, most people do not.
If what you said will happen, then it should have already happened after 1989 Tian An Men square event. Look how everything turned out to be.
An allegation of collusion between a government and criminal enterprises? If this were written about the US Government this would have been popularly tagged "conspiracytheory".
Just a bit of Chinese history which might change your mind a little bit:
Despite its shear size of territory, dominating culture, enormous population and wealth, as well as large number of military personel, starting from 1127, China
suffered the following defeats against tiny opponents with substantailly less resources:
1127: Lost half of their country to Jurchen, a small tribe originated from the northeast corner of China.
1279: Conquered by Mongols, a small tribe originated in the northern steppes of China. To be fair, China was not the only country conquered by the Mongols.
1644: Conquered by Manchurians, a small tribe originated in the same area as the Jurchen conquerors of 1127.
1839-1900: Repeatedly defeated by European countries on Chinese territory, despite their remote logistics and smaller sizes. To be fair, the Europeans had huge technological advantages.
1895: Defeated by Japan. A tiny island country off the east coast of China. Remember Japan at 1895 was nothing compared to the 2nd largest economy of the world today. Acutally the indemnity paid by the Chinese government at the end of the war was rumored to be three times the annual revenue of Japanese government at the time.
1941: Japan occupied most of the economically advanced areas of China. China reclaimed the land after Japan was defeated by Americans and Russians. When Japan invaded China the second time, they were already far more advanced in military technologies, obviously they put the large sum of indemnity from 1895 to some use.
All the conquerors of China listed above were tiny in population, territory, and economic power compared to China. They were culturally inferior too when they invaded China. Nobody would bet on them before the wars started. Why did China lose badly to all of them? Of course there was no single reason that can explain all. But there was one common phenomenon in all those Chinese defeats: large number of Chinese population joined the enemy side even though the invaders were of a different race and a different culture and came to China as conquerors. A bad government will likely to collapse at a time of war no matter how strong they seem to be and how much resource/population they control during peace time.
I like your idea of bounties! That would be something that interests me greatly.
I like your idea of bounties! That would be something that interests me greatly.
Yes, it would be a nice way to supplement one's income, and would have the additional benefit of distracting resident computer criminals from attacking U.S. interests. Who knows ... maybe we'll uncover some of China's state secrets for once.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
But do the carpets match the drapes?
The Opium Wars were fought in the throes of a dying dynasty run by occupying foreigners. It was hardly a cause that rank and file Hans were interested in dying for. The Sino-Japanese conflict took place immediately after the fall of the aforementioned dynasty when disunity ruled China more than any man or faction.
However, that is not China today. China is currently very strong and almost as unified as possible (Tibet and Xinjiang have never been more than ornery tributaries, so Taiwan is the only real missing piece). Its military is exponentially stronger, better trained, and with higher moral than it possessed in the century before the communists won the civil war.
You think farmer's revolts cause dissolution? You don't know much about 'their millenia in existence' then. A revolt brought down the Qin dynasty and as quickly raised a unified Han dynasty in its place. The transition from Yuan to Ming was similar.
If you want to deny China's might in spite of what I've already said, be my guest.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Hell, most of the war against Japan in WWII was centered around naval conflicts.
This just in: Japan is an island whose territory consisted mostly of other islands .
The US navy is formidable and deserves respect, but it is not the be all and end all of any conflict. Naval warfare is about force projection and support. If operations on the ground are woefully outnumbered or just too far away, no support will help. Further, aircraft carriers are only as effective as the aircraft they can field, and you can bet that even eleven carriers fully stocked could not go toe to toe with the entire PLA Air Force that can field more than twice as many aircraft over friendly territory (hint: air defense infrastructure).
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
China was more involved in Korea and Vietnam than the USSR, ergo it was more politically important to (East) Asia than the USSR. Economically in Asia the USSR was nothing. NOTHING. Japan was Asia's 20th century economic leader, with China, Korea, HK, Taiwan and Thailand in tow. I suggest further that you dismiss culture so quickly because you know China's culture is so important to the continent. The language, literature, art, cuisine, music, religion, etc. of Japan, Korea, and Indochina are undeniably significantly derived from China. India was not so directly influenced by China because of a little thing called the Himalayan Mountains.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
It may surprise you to learn that the EU is not (yet) a nation anymore than NATO is.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Ya, I'd FAR prefer the President make a statement prior to having some solid factual evidence. Jumping to conclusions makes things better for EVERYONE!
Is Google a country yet?
that such espionage activities might be wroks of some overenthusiastic intelligent people, which are not known to top Chinese leadership. A statement by U.S secretary will be necessary to get their attentions. Anyone who has some memory about the 1989 Iran-Contra affairs will know what I'm talking about.
In China they find it necessary to hack google in order to spy on broads? i do not understand...
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
Google faces some pretty stiff competition in the Chinese market from domestic competitors like alibaba and baidu. This move allows Google to get a leg up on the competition by nosing into a possibly large and untapped market: Chinese people that would prefer to have their internet search uncensored. Of course this assumes that Google can remain operating in China with or without the government's consent.
Either Google wins in China in spite of the government, or they're trying to penetrate a market in which the government works against them, and it's not worth their while. No matter how it turns out, Google gets plenty of press, and is acting as though it has some semblance of a moral backbone, which is more than we can say for Google's competitors (read: M$). If I were a shareholder, I'd be proud.
Even if, the point is moot. Who would then buy China goods when Europe and USA are nuked into the stone age. Would not really help at all.
The whole nuclear war is just complete waste of time. Nukes in that size and amount are really completely uesless.
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
We gave them this infrastructure 30+ years ago and now they're using it against us. How about if ICANN just revokes the .cn TLD and deallocates all IP blocks living within their borders? If they like censorship so much, let's see how they like it when the rest of the planet treats them like they treat their own people. Sure, there'd be a global meltdown, but we just learned how to deal with those. And yes, this is a stupid post -- just dreaming out loud.
No, I agree with you, I don't think they have an interest in that.
To clarify, my point was that many Western fears about China are completely unfounded, because even if China did have the interest in going for a military option (which again, like you, I don't believe they do) then they do not have the capability to win any kind of victory. In all offensive scenarios, conventional or nuclear, right now, they do not have the capacity to be anything but the losing side, the scales are tipped too far against them militarily.
I'm not even convinced they'd cope that well in a defensive capacity against a full scale attack from the West, because as I say an attack on them would leave them in a position where they could no longer use hundreds of thousands of troops to supress dissidents in places like Tibet, and to defend their disputed regions against Russia and India. Whilst I wouldn't expect the US would want to land on their shores, a flurry of attacks from cruise missiles, stealth aircraft airstrikes and so forth would be enough to cripple their infrastructure severely.
But again, this is precisely why I agree with your point that China has no interest in going down this route, even if I disagree slightly on the reasons for not wanting to. I believe they know full well that too large a percent of their military is required to maintain internal stability for them to have any true interest in dealing with external threats.
That is what I am wondering about. Are the Chinese officials really thinking about changing their censorship policy ?
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Could it be the case that Google had to provide some censoring 'backdoors' in China
to comply with the Chinese law and that these 'backdoors' were subsequently mis-used for attacks?
That would explain the the relation between the attacks and the censoring.
Incorrect, but a fine example of the irrational populistic nationalism (Han-chauvinism) that replaced communism around 1992 as Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) excuse for remaining the omnipotent clique to rule the Chinese empire.
It was actually Willy Clinton who in early 1990s delinked China's criminal record (human rights in China and the neighbouring states it continues to occupy, exploit and repress) from trade relations with the USA, which were until then annually reviewed for the "Most Favored Nation" (!) policy. The China-appeasing Clintons went on to receive illegal campaign funding from the Chinese Communist Party.
With the moral-free American multi-nationals flocking into China to take advantage of the newly business-friendly fascist environment, the moral-free European multi-nationals had "no choice" except to follow the example, gradually followed by the rest of the Western manufacturing base.
Meanwhile the desperately needed Western investment into the newly democratic former communist countries (esp. Eastern Europe) and other developing democracies all but dried up. Corporations had spoken. But it took someone like Willy Clinton to get the era of CCP-controlled globalism started.
Again you are irrationally (or intentionally) mixing up the totally opposite concepts of China-hating and Chinese regime-hating. This is of course typical of Han-chauvinist propaganda and unfortunately common in today's China where the state propaganda machine uses "external threats against the Chinese people" to rally the masses behind its new nationalist ideology.
President Obama may lack the full backing of the powerful "pro-China" corporate lobby (the main reason why Hillary Clinton got appointed), but at least civil rights have fundamental meaning to him. That he can not act upon his natural instincts vis a vis China's rising mercantilism and aggression is due to the massive hole dug up during the four terms of Clinton and Bush Jr.
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
As others have mentioned, Google didn't do this because it's the good thing to do. They did this because it makes good business sense. If it had been financially advantageous to remain in China and even court their government more closely Google would have done that instead.
You can say that, but I think you would be wrong. There are many, many times when corporations act to do something besides make money. Hell, underlying the whole banking catastrophe was a sense of mission to put people into homes.
Do corporations exist to make money? Yes. But the truth is, many people that found them and run them see them as a vehicle for their personal goals, first and foremost.
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Sure it won't do to underestimate China, but it also doesn't make sense to accept their own sense of importance as fact.
China's "lashing out with wounded national pride" is actually typically limited to press releases, slightly delaying contracts, complaints to ambassadors. Very rarely does it actually impact political or economical relations. The Chinese government is well aware that for the time being it needs the West a lot more than the other way round.
The Bering Strait is only about twice as wide as the English Channel at the respective narrowest of each, and the Normandy invasion took routes in excess of the distance across the Bering Strait.
And it's Russian terrority. The Russian have a history of quarrels with China even during the cold war when they were on the same side of their "block".
As for the last 50 years... remember that little conflict called Vietnam? Do you really think that the NVA and NVC could have stood up to the US without the support of the PRC? (And there was a lot more of it than official records are ever going to admit.)
Do you actually know that communist Vietman and PRC were at war after the Vietman war ?
And do you know that the PRC lost ?
And the Vietman was mainly allied with Communist Russia which had a very bad relation with the PRC after the death of Stalin ? They nearly went at war with each other...
You seem to be greatly uninformed.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I am not saying it is the be all end all of a conflict. I am saying that naval forces and the types of forces involved in a conflict must be taken into account during a battle discussion. Numbers don't mean everything. The battle of Thermopylae taught us that thousands of years ago. Maybe our Aircraft carriers couldn't go toe to toe with the PLA Airforce, but you are making the assumption that China has the capability and infrastructure to deploy that entire air force to one area in a short span of time. That is no easy feat. Even if China could scramble its entire airforce and get them coastal to perform a coordinated attack on one part of a naval blockade, miles down the coast, a gunnery force could shell a good chunk of Chinese infrastructure to craters. Have you seen the rail gun mounts that the US Navy is trying to deploy on a large scale these days? Those suckers can nail a target over the horizon.
So sure, the U.S. Navy is not the end all be all, and to claim it is would be false. I agree. It's also true that China should not be taken as a grain of salt militarily. However, my point is, boasting the biggest armed forces on the planet means little unless you have the experience to use it.
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Per capita GDP is not a king-maker, otherwise there would be a lot of tiny European countries that somehow would manage to rule the world.
When you have more people than anybody else, it may be hard to notice the upper end of the curve, but I assure you, Shanghai is a far more prosperous place than Bogota, Havana, or Warsaw. And it is the growing Chinese middle and upper class that runs the country. China is not as well run as other countries, yes, but again going back to the GDP list, it is better run than Columbia and Cuba.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
I know all of these supposed revelations of yours, you just greatly exaggerate their importance.
FACT: China supplied more manpower and material support to NVA and NVC forces than the USSR.
Even if China's relationship with Hanoi was not as good, that didn't matter, because there was no way that the USSR possessed the logistical capacity to provide more men and supplies to a country that bordered China through and around China. It just wasn't physically possible. Vietnam and China never reached a level of conflict much in excess of that experienced in other disputed border areas like those in India and USSR/Russia. Diplomatically significant, yes, but not real 'war'.
A Bering Straight scenario is quite frankly, wild fantasy, I was just saying that it at least would be physically possible. I also don't think that Russia could stand against China in a physical conflict anymore. A lot has changed since the sixties, and Russia's armed forces are a rusted, disorganized wreck, where China's are exponentially more capable than ever before.
China's future foreign policy is going to be truly determined by its economic colonialism in Africa and Central/South America. If it creates a power block in the Southern Hemisphere it might have enough backing that the whole world wouldn't ally against an aggression in whatever direction, as would be the case now.
That too would require a change in the Chinese themselves, who have not tended to be very aggressive outside of their immediate sphere of influence. They don't have the same 'world domination' view of empire building that the West has traditionally had.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
I don't doubt that China has a large military in terms of shear numbers for their infantry, but how mobile are they? Could they wage a war across the Pacific theater here in the US? The answer is, "no" - our Navy would keep them from every being able to get any large number of troops to ever make landfall in the continental US. So, while they may have a decent defensive war fighting capability, they would never be able to bring the war to us here in the US.
Also, the prior proxy wars that you speak of that "the US could not defeat China in" - Vietnam is the one you're speaking of, right (Korea was more of a proxy war with USSR)? Well, I think any sober analysis will conclude that public perception of the news reels and the heavy political involvements in our rules of engagements kept the US forces from "winning" in Vietnam. Had our forces not been hamstrung by stupid rules of engagements, and had our forces been allowed to actually occupy territory (instead of just pulling out after winning, and allowing the NV to just come back and reoccupy), we may have actually been effective in something there. Make no mistake about it - we never lost any large battles in Vietnam - but unfortunately, we never had a clear war that we were trying to win either, thus our individual battles never added up to a cohesive whole.
I'm not saying that the US military could just waltz in to Beijing and be done with it before dinner time, but I don't see how China's military could ever pose a threat to the US (and even if they some how did come over here, the Chinese borders would then be more unguarded - would N Korea and Russia take some interest in expanding their borders at that time? Basically, would China lose their own territories if they try to do anything with their military here in the continental US?)
The only thing is - which companies are going to pull out due to Google's actions? Honestly, most companies that make money through China does so by exploiting the cheap labor there in manufacturing. Apple, Dell, etc as far as tech companies go - they make money by indirectly hiring a cheaper work force in China then they could ever hire here in America. Which of these companies are going to pull out due to Google's actions? I don't think this is going to cause many other companies (who are profitable in China) to pull out. It may give companies who have failed to make any profits an excuse to pull out at this time, to cover up their failures in monetizing the Chinese markets correctly, but this won't have any effects on otherwise profitable companies there.
I agree, China could not pose a credible threat in a ground war against the continental US, but it goes both ways, even with naval superiority, the US does not pose a credible threat in a ground war against China either.
The Soviets did provide more material support for Korea than Vietnam, but in both cases it was Chinese soldiers who were the ones in every trench next to the natives. It's only natural considering the shared borders. It is true what you say, the US lost in Vietnam on policy, not in the field, but ask yourself, has policy changed? Are we any more effective in Iraq or Afghanistan? Are American GIs all super happy about ROEs as they are today? The US is just as hamstrung in the field today as in Vietnam. China never did and never will give two shits, they'll do what it takes. There's no moral highground for them, but in practical terms that's not going to matter.
The US is in a unique geopolitical situation. There is virtually no way that a wholly conventional ground war against the US could succeed from any quarter. That does not mean that US interests are invulnerable, and that economic damage could not be done to the US. Less is possible in the opposite direction, because in the decades after problems with resource shortfalls in the early period of CCP control, China has focused on being as self-sufficient as possible. The character of the Chinese people is very different too, something that somebody who hasn't studied them both personally and abstractly won't be able to understand. The Chinese can be happy with less. Lin Yutang said (roughly) that if China had been populated by Americans there would have been twenty revolutions for every one that the Chinese did themselves. It's not something I can easily explain.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Sadly, there's a difference between being aggressive, and being a hyper-aggressive idiot. The Japaneese knew what Halsey was like, and lured him away from the landings he was supposed to be proecting to near disaster at Leyte Gulf.
The thought was that China would be replaced with another developing country hungry for trade with the US. Don't really know much about this, but India comes to mind, along with any of the newly-democratic countries in East Europe or South America. Obviously couldn't happen overnight...
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Agreed.
I think the chinese have taken their Sun Tzu very seriously. They've defeated the west with its own tools: Capitalism. Maybe the west could even defeat China on the battlefield. Right after that, the world economy would collapse, because both fiscal and productive ties to China are so strong.
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Yes, but you have to adjust the actual size of the market. This is really made up of the people who have disposable income - so sure you have the population of Shanghai and Beijing and quite a number of other cities, but the rest of the people you can't really sell to, and that's not going to change for quite some time. As I said - China should not be underestimated. Howver currently the opposite is happening and China is punching far above it's weight - just on the expectation that it's going to be a developed country "soon".
I don't think you really have clear perspective... which really isn't to be held against you when you're dealing with more than a billion people. That's just hard to visualize. Even if 90% of the people in China aren't 'reachable' or 'viable' consumers (a debatable thing in itself), 10% of China is the same as 100% of Japan, and the same again as double nations like France, Italy, and Britain. In that context, if only 5% of China reaches whatever amorphously qualifies as 'developed' then that developed part of China is directly equivalent to many of the countries of Europe.
I recognize that this is a kind of cherry picking, but it's the way most countries are thought of. People judge Canada by life in Montreal, not by life in Arviat; people judge the US by its metropolitan centers, not by its dumpy rural backwaters.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Sorry, but this is wishful thinking. China is following its goals and will not stop because of some public image issues. They manufacture most goods in the world, develop their technology by inviting Western investments, educate their young at the higher levels and in great numbers using Western Universities.
In a short time they will become self-sufficient and that will be a not-so-sunny day for our hedonistic civilization.