Slashdot Mirror
Google Accuses China of Interfering With Gmail
Hugh Pickens writes "The Guardian reports that Google has accused the Chinese government of interfering with Gmail. According to the search giant, Chinese customers and advertisers have increasingly been complaining about their Gmail service in the past month and attempts by users to send messages, mark messages as unread and use other services have generated problems for Gmail customers. The announcement follows a blog posting from Google on 11 March in which the firm said it had 'noticed some highly targeted and apparently politically motivated attacks against our users. We believe activists may have been a specific target.' The search firm is not commenting further on this latest attack, but technology experts said it seemed to show an increasingly high degree of sophistication."
When the economists predicted that China would be the next big power maybe they meant internet power!
Practice Shunning. Get all your friends to do the name. Tell Nixon to stay home.
Google should just fucking cut China off. Let them try to do business while the rest of the world moves on with GMail. Do it for a week, at least. I understand that they want to exert control over their citizens, but Homey don't play that shit over here.
Already seen that on /. more than once and other sources even date it to early 2010. Is this a gritty reboot?
Mostly harmless.
The sheer, breaktaking arrogance and aggression of the Red Chinese is unbelievable. I laugh out loud whenever I read an apologist for the Chinese Communist Party accuse teh yankee imperialist dogs of arrogance, when they themselves are shaping up to be the most brutal and self-interested global imperialists the world has ever known.
People are going to look back on the dominance of the West as a golden age once the mainland Chinese are through with us.
Is anybody really surprised at this? China is a communist country. They are in the business of world domination. They will never stop trying to steal technology or stop attacking their political enemies using whatever methods at their disposal. A lot of people complain about our (the U.S.) government. We're amateurs at invading privacy and interfering with commerce compared to those guys...
Nothing to see here but us trolls...move along...
I find it interesting that, when the media talk about Chinese hackers, they invariably refer to it as attacks by "China" -- not "Chinese hackers", as would be the case in just about any other country in the world.
Can we really always assume that the Chinese government or China as a country is behind each and every attack, or is it just the work of some extremists within the country's borders?
...or is it just the work of some extremists within the country's borders?
Yes, they go by the handle 'PRC'.
Interfering with traffic in-transit is beyond the ability of all but the best hackers without government aid. They would need to either be good enough to compromise and operate network infrastructure without detection (hard) or actually be employed by an ISP in a high enough position that they don't have someone else checking their configs (Also hard). It can't be the work of some basement-dweller gang. It's either an organised group of super-hackers, or a government agency. The latter seems more probable.
is hobbled by this pesky thing called democracy, human rights, a free press. it interferes with profits
china is autocracy combined with capitalism. it is the gilded age of victorian times in the west when workers rights were nonexistent, squared. china is a giant capitalist machine that treats its citizens as robots without rights. why the chinese people accept this is beyond my understanding, but for now, they do
chinese people: your government does not respect you. you do not have a voice in the composition of your own government. you are a slave. in the name of respecting you as my fellow human beings, i disrespect the policies of your government. rise up and reject their illegitimate claims to rule you without your input
i will fully respect a china that is democratic. until then, your country is doomed, because it is unstable. no government that does not subject itself to the will of its people via a regular vote ever lasts very long. only democracy manufactures legitimacy, and therefore stability. all other forms of government crumble and fall, until after any number of revolutions, the people finally adopt democracy, and are able to keep it
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Posting AC as to avoid undoing a previous mod.
I find it interesting that, when the media talk about Chinese hackers, they invariably refer to it as attacks by "China" -- not "Chinese hackers", as would be the case in just about any other country in the world.
Can we really always assume that the Chinese government or China as a country is behind each and every attack, or is it just the work of some extremists within the country's borders?
The reason that people usually say "China" as opposed to "Chinese" is that most hackers within China are affiliated with the government. There are units both in the People's Liberation Army and in the Chinese State Security apparatus that are devoted solely to hacking and other forms of online attacks. Most university students studying these things are getting recruited by the government, if not having their education paid for by the government. The university professors teaching them are virtually kept on call by the government. I actually wrote a paper that dealt with this for one of my graduate-level IR classes, unfortunately it was in my old laptop so I lost it, so I can't give you the exact sources or unit designations devoted to this.
Company does business with censoring government; complains when government censors.
Next up: War in the Middle East! The unthinkable has happened!
China don't own Bartertown.
Is that you President Jintao?
I've been living in Shanghai since September, and this place is annoying as hell to stay connected. I should not complain too much as I have not been jailed as others have (yet) for winge-ing, but my digital life in the Emerald City (Seattle) is difficult to maintain over here. Forget streaming as China Telecom breaks the connection every 10 minutes just to keep things boring. The last few weeks have been especially bad, as the riots elsewhere scared the police here poopless and they shut down large network segments in order to inhibit riot-forming people (presumably). Our entire company was shut down for a morning, and connections were flaky for a few days. If they are targeting Gmail, next, then I am screwed (Google bashers will say I already am :). My VPN services are being attacked as well.
It's real and it's real bad.
Is that the same Google that censors its Chinese search results to block terms like "democracy"? Guess oppression is okay unless you try to steal their source code or interfere with the quality of their services.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It gets a lot easier when you have your own certificates ... I remember seeing some outcry about certain Chinese telecoms getting them a year or 2 ago. Perhaps people should be removing those from their trusted lists?
i mean their own certificate authorities (CAs)
I would suggest all software released outside of China should prohibit any CAs in the default trusted list that are Chinese or owned by China.
What the hell did you think was going to happen.. in China?
In China, China decides what China wants, and what it doesn't want, and if you do not offer them a way to do what they want your app to do, they will find a way themselves, and usually not a very efficient way either...
Thank you for the correction, yes, that was my meaning. A MITM attack becomes quite easy with your own CA.
A country infamous for their "great firewall" screws with yet another service.
Be honest, the service being screwed with (Google) is the only reason this is a headline.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
How is this surprising? China is a communist country they are not a democracy. They will not hesitate to bring military actions against there own people in order to bring them back into line. You do business with the devil and somewere down the line your going to pay
Jack of all trades,master of none
Since you felt the need to be pedantic, it should be, "If his penis were the size[...]"
The problem with google is that they are taking political posture too much as a private company. Politics and moral ground wouldn't get along well with business. If google see itself as the God, get out from China. Is that simple? The problem is google wants to do business with China but also pretend to be the God. Adding too much Western value it. China is entirely different country and culture. It has no history to be altered by out force. They will never get succeed in China. Losing China in business is losing the world in nowadays. LOL.
Everything comes from nothing.
A good country with a shitty government. Hope they throw that government out.
That's the NSA's job...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
bound to pop up in any discussion like this
sir: with your words, you are only announcing your profound ignorance of places outside of the west, and what it is really like there
let's just say that if you were chinese, in china, or iranian, in iran, or cuban, in cuba, you wouldn't dare criticize the chinese or iranian or cuban government like you criticize the usa. you criticize the usa however, with impunity, merely because you are perfectly free and entitled to do so. and i'm glad you do. is anyone knocking on your door sir? no? is anyone in the american government going to persecute you for the words you just wrote? no?
so when you realize the truth of how different it is for citizens in these other countries to express themselves freely, maybe you can begin to understand the subject matter you are so ignorantly commenting on
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
That's President Hu to you.
Support SETI@home
I don't know! O_o
Indeed, thanks.
As a non US citizen I think I am going to come across as a troll.... by making this coment.
America is in great danger, China is going to take over the world and you should live in fear and prepare for war...
most hackers within China are affiliated with the government.
Citation needed.
Why don't they just buy Google? They have enough dollars saved in the piggy bank to buy 100 Googles.
The best China can do is shutdown gmail in China. In this way Google will cease to complain.