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Google has a China crisis
INTERNET SEARCH AND ADVERTISING giant Google is refusing to censor searches and is threatening to pull out of the world's largest potential market after Chinese hackers attacked the firm and tricked human rights activists into opening their email accounts to outsiders.
It will be a huge about-face for Google which has always said obeyed Chinese laws that require some politically and socially sensitive issues to be blocked from search results that are available in other countries
But in his blog, Google's chief legal officer David Drummond said that Goggle detected a "highly sophisticated and targeted attack on its corporate infrastructure originating from China."
The goal of the attackers apparently was to get their paws on the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.
Google did not say that the attack was carried out by the Chinese Government. It did not have too. It said that it is "no longer willing to continue censoring our results" sent to users in mainland China, as the Chinese Government requires. This means that Google will have to shut down its search operations in the People's Republic of China and possibly also its offices in the country.
It looks like Google is furious that after having done its best to kowtow to the autocrats in Beijing it still ended up being attacked and turned over.
Google is a smaller Internet search player in China than it is in the rest of the world. Last year Baidu.com handled 62 per cent of web searches in China compared with 29 per cent for Google.
In a big 'screw you' to China's Government Google has started showing off pictures of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests again on its Chinese language search website. This subject has always miffed the Chinese authorities who have told their citizens that it never happened or if it did the students that they murdered in the protests deserved it.
However its change of policy in China distracts from what might be a bigger problem for Google. The hacking showed how vulnerable its systems are to attack. Google has been promising users that their accounts and data are safe and secure in its data centres, and indeed its whole cloud business model for future expansion depends on its customers believing this.
According to the LA Times, Google officials said that the immediate financial effects would be "immaterial," with China sales accounting for only a fraction of its $22 billion in annual revenue. But long-term prospects are considered to be huge for a country that may soon have a billion users of mobile phones and the Internet.
James Mulvenon, an expert on Chinese cyber warfare with Defence Group, said that for Google to have come to the conclusion that it needed to pull up stakes in China, this attack must have gone to the core of its systems.
Gartner Group also smells a rat. Gartner Analyst John Pescatore said that Chinese sponsored Internet attacks have been going on for years, and Google shouldn't have been surprised by either industrial or political spying.
Pescatore said that Google must be more concerned that the attacks have compromised its image of having effective security. The company stores nearly all the data entrusted to it on a global network of servers referred to as 'the cloud'.
The apparently successful Chinese attacks pose the question of whether we can trust Google to carry our email in the cloud when it's had problems protecting its own infrastructure, he indicated.
Meanwhile the UK bookmaker Paddypower reportedly is offering 3:1 odds that Google will follow through on it's threat to quit China before 2012. µ
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That's what is scaring the Chinese leadership, that the people might turn on them and push them out and seek justice.
1 young woman stabbed 2 officials who tried to rape her. http://www.socialistalternative.org/news/article11.php?id=1104
Another example:
http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20061109_1.htm
"This article revealed that a former Fuxin city mayor, city party secretary and People's Congress director over fifteen years by the name of Wang Yachen stole the fortune worth more than 100 million RMB from the private entrepreneur Gao Wenhua. Furthermore, he used his daughter Wang Xiaoyun (who was deputy director of the Fuxin city public security bureau) and his son Wang Xiaogang (who was the deputy squadron leader of the Fuxin city security police squadron) to send the asset-owner into prison for eleven months."
Another story where and young man was executed after he killed 6 police officers, the police put his mother in a mental institution for 4 months during his trial. The officials also removed his lawyer and appointed a state paid lawyer:
http://globalvoicesonline.org/2008/11/26/china-yang-jia-is-dead/
"According to Yang's testimony, he was wrongly accused by the Shanghai police for stealing bicycle in 2007 and suffered from physical abuse during the detention. However, in a close door trial in August, Yang was sentenced to death without a reasonable explanation of his intention in the verdict [zh]. Many considered the trial unfair as the lawyer that Yang's father hired were denied and the government appointed another lawyer, a legal consultant for Zhabei district government [zh], to represent Yang. More scandalous is the fact that Yang's mother, Wang Jingmei, had been kept in a psychiatric hospital [zh] run by the Beijing Police Bureau for about four months, throughout the prosecution of her son. (English briefing see Yang Jia: Stranger than Fiction)"
There are loads of these stories of the people killing the authorities in China over the past couple of years. It could only take 1 serious event to cause a serious uprising.
If Google is pulling out then this is a sign that the Chinese are going into another cycle of walling themselves further off from the rest of the world ... for a few years.
Why?
Well the number of Chinese now who are better off financially has increased dramatically in the last 5 to 10 years.
They want their freedom, and they want to live just like the rest of us.
They want change, and they want to question how and why their country is run the way it is.
I really feel for the Chinese as their totalitarian government is clearly very scared of its own people.
Enough to close the doors again ... and cull those of its own who question the way things are.
Then they will open the doors again in a few ears ... with newfriendly faces on their side ... who ask few questions.
Is china building a cyber great wall ?
I was reading some great info about China's great wall and I could not help but see similarity on how China wants to build a cyber great wall,
to censor the rest of the world and only allow what it wants through its interenets... anyway, if you find the great wall fascinating here is the article I was reading earlier
link.
a href="http://ketiva.com/Education_and_Reference/unusual_legend_of_great_wall_of_china.html" http://ketiva.com/Education_and_Reference/unusual_legend_of_great_wall_of_china.html /a
For those interested in an insiders view of "China", its politics and how it "deals" with people, governments and more or less everybody, try http://www.amazon.co.uk/Last-Governor-Chris-Patten-Handover/dp/0751522724/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1263418008&sr=8-1
It may open your mind
Dweeb
If reality is the issue, why doesn't Apple move into China to fill the gap?
Apple is quite adept at brainwashing its customers, so I would think that this could be a great opportunity to spread its wings and expand its reality distortion field to a larger audience. A natural fit.
It is really not surprising that Google finds its business model incompatible with that of the Chinese Government.
After all, Google is all about helping people discover "reality"; how to freely search and discover information about our world (and other worlds as well).
China's government, on the other hand, is all about unreality; how to restrict information to generate some government-approved vision of how "good citizens" are supposed to think and behave.
Sure, some other search provider (like Microsoft) could try and step in, but the resulting bad advertising for them (as opposed to the good PR Google is generating by flipping the finger at China's brainwashing policies) will probably only hurt them (and help Google) in the long run.
Except someone forgot to give a golden handshake to the right person in charge.
It might also spell out some of the western ignorance, and arrogance, when it comes to dealing with the Chinese.
Play their games, or take your toys and leave the playground.
I wish I could credit whoever said this, but I can't remember where it came from. But here it is, "People here think no-one can do without China, and I think now some companies are thinking no-one can deal with China,"
From the few people that I know who have had to deal with China on a business level would agree. There is a lot of opportunities in China, but dealing with the BS might outweigh the profits. This just might be the beginning.
Google enabled HTTPS / SSL as default for webmail last night.
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/default-https-access-for-gmail.html
Could we have an artice on exactly how GCHQ systems etc will monitor Gmail e-mails for terrorist activities etc. How much extra it will cost governments etc..
Its a shame pulling out of China only really effects google in the long run. I mean theres the initial bad PR china will receive, but thats nothing new to china when it comes to human rights!
The gap in the search market will quickly be followed by another competitor and tax revenues will follow.
How do you tackle such a powerful country like china without completely cutting your own throat?