During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act - George Orwell
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Why Google hates China so much
APPLE'S FAVOURITE NEWSPAPER, the New York Times has revealed why Google has it in for the Glorious People's Republic of China.
When the news broke that Google was thinking of pulling out of China over the hacking of a few dissidents' email accounts some of us smelt a stir-fried rat. After all what are a few dissidents when you have a multi-million dollar expanding business in China?
At the time Google said the attack was sophisticated when what it described as having happened was not all that complicated.
It turns out that what was actually at stake was the password system that controls access by millions of users worldwide to almost all of the company's web services, including e-mail and business applications.
The password system, dubbed Gaia, was attacked in a lightning raid that took less than two days last December, the New York Times' reported.
Google's single-signon password system is so secret that it was mentioned only once four years ago at a technical conference populated by just a few geeks who were immediately taken out and shot afterwards.
The software enables users and employees to sign in with their passwords just once to operate a range of services.
While the Chinese did not get any passwords of Gmail users, it seems that Google had a collective heart attack. Following the intrusions it has since made significant changes to the security of its networks.
What worries Google, said the Times, is that the theft leaves open the possibility, however faint, that the intruders might find other weaknesses.
The theft began with an instant message sent to a Google employee in China who was using Microsoft's Messenger program. That person clicked on a link to a "poisoned" web site.
The hackers used this to gain access to his or her personal computer and from there to the computers of a critical group of software developers at Google's headquarters. That gave them control of a software repository used by the development team. µ
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Oh, please
"The theft began with an instant message sent to a Google employee in China who was using Microsoft’s Messenger program, according to the person with knowledge of the internal inquiry, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified"?
So no, google employee did not use gtalk, he/she used MSN? Right. Let me turn off half of my brain and I might swallow this bs.
As for google getting a collective heart attack, serves them right. For more than a decade we have abandoned "security through obscurity" for exactly these reasons. Then this also means they did not patch it properly and cannot patch it properly as had they done it and are 100% confident in their "secret" they would not pull out of China.
If so, i would think twice before getting an Android...
...for running Microsoft software with open access to your internal network. Of course Google needs to run Windows to test their software, but sandboxing Windows boxes so they can only do limited damage "when" they are infected I think would be the first step in preventing future problems such as this. Using them for everyday use (including accessing the Internet) is probably not a great idea, either. They are competing with Microsoft,yet using Microsoft's buggy products themselves has placed them at a competitive disadvantage.
I know Google has developed their own (internal use) Linux distro for servers, but perhaps they should look at the desktop as well (or at thin clients). If they buy Novell, they would have both.
Chinese foundry SMIC stole TSMC's process technology.
Chinese networking equipment company Huawei stole Cisco's router operating system.
Government officials cheer the whole time, so long as they are properly compensated.
It's one hell of a way to run a country.
Since China's government loves Intel's innovation, Intel has built a semiconductor wafers plant in China. Hopefully, the chips from this plant will have some special receipts that suitable to be implanted in the brain.
Google's privacy policy will protect you!
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." - Schmidt (Google CEO)