Google China crisis: analyst ’smells a rat’
p2pnet news view P2P | Politics:- Will Google pull out of China?
Yesterday, it said its China venture will now stop censoring searches —-
—- but not because it’s finally conceded it’s wrong from every perspective to deliberately and knowingly limit peoples’ access to information.
Rather, it’s angry because it “detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google,” it says on its blog.
“We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China [read Google] and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results,” it says.
‘ … less than two percent … ‘
p2pnet was the first to reveal Google was censoring news within mainland China.
DIT’s DynaWeb was a “free proxy network built to circumvent internet blocking in China” and CEO Bill Xia told me that on September 15, DynaWeb revealed Google’s news results for China were different than those conducted in the US.
“We were able to confirm this report through proxies in China,” he said.
Google spokeswoman Debbie Frost later told p2pnet, “to create the best possible news search experience for our users, we sometimes decide not to include some sites, for a variety of reasons”.
Does ‘not include’ amount to ‘block’? And does ‘block’ amount to ‘censor’? – I wondered, going on >>>
Google justifies the fact it ‘omits’ some sites in mainland China by saying, “[...] it’s clear that search results deemed to be sensitive for political or other reasons are inaccessible within China. There is nothing Google can do about this,” and:
“We … considered the amount of information that would be omitted. In this case it is less than two percent of Chinese news sources. On balance we believe that having a service with links that work and omits a fractional number is better than having a service that is not available at all.”
Logic suggests the most sensitive sites would be the ones ‘omitted’. Otherwise, why bother?
Google’s blog says it has evidence to suggest “a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.”
‘Google shouldn’t have been surprised … ‘
Says Nick Farrell in The Inquirer, today >>>
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.
Stay tuned.
(Cheers, Marc)
Jon Newton - p2pnet
..… and identi.ca
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
pull out of China – Google to halt China censorship, January 12, 2010
p2pnet – Google ‘Don’t be Evil’ amended, April 15, 2008
The Inquirer – Google has a China crisis, January 13, 2010
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