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."
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...
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.
You could just stop buying everything made in China. But then there wouldn't be very much left you could buy.
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.
>>>You could just stop buying everything made in China. But then there wouldn't be very much left you could buy.
You could just stop buying.
Wise advice for a US culture
~$120,000 in personal debt
(plus another 140,000/home national debt).
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
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.
Google China stopped serving censored results. Source: The very same Wikipedia article you reference.
When it comes to knocking China's problems, we certainly don't have the moral high ground. Same shit, different culture.
Until the US starts putting people in labor camps for not being harmonious enough, I would say that we do. I don't think we need to be perfect before we point out the shortcomings of other governments.
Because of a ton of propaganda. The Chinese government has very tight reigns on all information sources. Even the Bible had to be rewritten according to the CG's standards.
But if you don't accept it, you'll get put into a re-educational institution for an indefinite period, if you're lucky. If you're unlucky you'll just get imprisoned or executed. There are literally millions of spies among the Chinese population, eager to aprehend anyone to the government if they could potentially pose any form of threat to its authority.
The way Gaddafi has been treating its citizens would be considered kind in comparison to how the CG would react. The really big problem is that China is huge - it has almost twice as many citizens as America and Europe combined. Not to mention the amount of nuclear weapons. If there would be a third world war with China, I doubt the Earth would survive it.
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