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."

Comments

Red Chinese arrogance

[benjfowler]

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.

Re:Red Chinese arrogance

[Anonymous Coward]

They refuse to accept that communism is a good IDEA but doesn't work in the real world, due to leadership corruption.

The same criticism is often leveled at capitalism.

Re:Red Chinese arrogance

[milkmage]

not so much arrogance/aggression as pure paranoia.. they don't fucking trust anyone.

my sister was stationed in China during for her tour in the Peace Corps. She was teaching English at a University.

My mom sent her a care package - including some nicknacks for her students (candy, shit like that).. the padding in the package was a US newspaper, which just happened to have full color pictures of a gay parade. within 24 hours - Washington got a call from Beijing. Apparently the Chinese didn't appreciate the nature of the packing material and threatened to expel my sister from the country if it happened again.

when I went to visit, I was a guest speaker in her class - I was peppered by the students with questions like "do i know Michael Jordan, what's a drugstore, do I have a car".. then one guy asks (in much better english than the rest of the kids) - how I felt about the US presence in Afghanistan (this was less than a year after 9/11). The Party put a mole in my sister's class.

Uh.. Yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Yeah, my heroes

[elrous0]

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.

Re:the west's pursuit of capitalism

[MrEricSir]

As opposed to the United States, where the free press is censored by advertisers, democracy is subverted by corporate interests, and we offshore our human rights violations to Cuba?

When it comes to knocking China's problems, we certainly don't have the moral high ground. Same shit, different culture.