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Google Is Still Working on China Search Engine, Employees Claim
Google is still pursuing its plan to launch a censored search engine for China, The Intercept reported Monday, citing unnamed employees. From the report: Late last year, bosses moved engineers away from working on the controversial project, known as Dragonfly, and said that there were no current plans to launch it. However, a group of employees at the company was unsatisfied with the lack of information from leadership on the issue -- and took matters into their own hands. The group has identified ongoing work on a batch of code that is associated with the China search engine, according to three Google sources. [...] The employees have been keeping tabs on repositories of code that are stored on Google's computers, which they say is linked to Dragonfly. The code was created for two smartphone search apps -- named Maotai and Longfei -- that Google planned to roll out in China for users of Android and iOS mobile devices.
These Google employees make me laugh. They really think Google is going to give up untold millions of dollars just because China requires filtered search results that adhere to the Politburo's censorship?
Me-thinks all you people need to get out and vote if you really want to create change where US companies do not do business with Totalitarian regimes and support censorship and servitude.
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
Would be to have the search censorship mode for China, but with the following "features":
1) No disclosure to Chinese authorities about who is searching for what.
2) A full public list visible on the web everywhere in the world (or everywhere except China) of all of the search terms and logic used to do the censoring (transparent censoring?? haha)
3) A monthly count disclosed on the non-China website of what percentage of searches were censored.
Or something like that.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
If Google doesn't do it, someone else will...
Generally anyone who disagrees with Google's approach to this is lacking what most people lack when it comes to effecting change. If you disagree with China's policies regarding censorship, why would you want Google to stop? If you stop the project entirely, then you don't have a seat at the table and China will make it on their own. At least Google gets to influence direction and build a level of comfort in that over time can help them ease up on their control. Policy exists because of cultural attitudes, and culture changes slowly; usually over generations.
China's approach to free speech is extremely different than most Western thoughts on this, but when understood in the context of their history is completely understandable. China has gone through several cycles over the past several thousand years where affluence and economic growth leads to a cultural mismatch between classes, that often results in a period of major wars, destruction and death. The Chinese government knows this, and they know they're currently headed to one of those cycles again, as about 400M people live in a decent middle class lifestyle and about 900M people live in poverty today. They also know they cannot stop the process, but they are trying to manage it and spread the wealth of the coastal regions inland. The government views, and they do this through the lens of history as this is exactly how the Communist Party came to power, uncontrolled free speech as a chaotic force that can only accelerate this process and not control it, leading to a dysfunctional society at best and a major war at worst. President Xi Jinping is an authoritarian and not one to admire, but his massive anti-corruption campaign is designed to root out those in the way of spreading the coastal regions' wealth to the interior to avoid this exact issue.
Anyone including Google needs to approach working with China in this context. I'm not saying it's right; it is highly risky to do business there, but you also cannot force Western-style morals on doing business in China when the Chinese experience is very different.
the Internet in their own special ways nowadays.
...
Maybe it will fragment into 30 different country-nets instead of 2.
All the more reason why we need a distributed encrypted file-fragment layer that completely dissociates physical location from content, and a more secure and performant version of onion-routing for retrieval and coalescing of the information for the end user.
It will probably have to be buried, steganography-style, in thousands of seemingly innocent image or video serving sites world wide. I wonder where we could find those?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Not sure how Google employees think this works, but you don't get to tell your employer what to do.
Yes, China is awful. (And when I say that, I get called a right wing war monger by .... your average Google employee type.)
Yes, being in China would suck. But their policies certainly aren't going to change because of a google.cn site.
There are numerous benefits to them setting up shop there:
- Taking money out of the Chinese economy and putting it into ours
- Giving Chinese citizens more information is better
- Allows Google to create a foothold in China. If they become a major player there, they might be able to effect change down the line
The only real downside is the fact the engine will probably fail and thus cost money.
Just -balloon-drone-drop millions of smartphones into rural china where the smartphones talk to the new high-speed satellite Internet that's going up now. That way the resistance can communicate, or somewhat riskily watch unlimited Youtube.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
No, they are the same. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Tesla, Facebook, etc. They have a single goal. It is just amazing to me that people believe otherwise, but I guess that is the way it is. By the way: "Do no evil" was ALWAYS a joke. You just found out that it wasn't. But Google always knew it was.
that sub-project would be done as a crypto-funded "open sourced" effort by persons unknown concerned only with the spread of information and liberty etc etc.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Tesla gave away its EV tech patents royalty-free, to try to speed up the overall transition to EVs by letting other competing companies use their tech specs for free.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I know a man here in the City who used to work as a merc in various African border wars. He's a good man; albeit one with whom you would not want to have a fist fight. However he has no illusions that he was "killing terrorists" or any similar pap. He was a mercenary fighting on behalf of the highest bidder, that's it.