Shhhh: GOOGLE Censorship

[Richard]

Don't be a slave to one search engine - there are a ton of them out there, each with a different bent. None is perfect.

This is one I frequently find of use:

http://www.37.com/

Richard

[BigJimCalhoun]

Originally Posted by Sigaba

BJC--

Your observation raises interesting questions.

• Is a company's primary responsibility to its owners or to the country where it has its corporate offices?
• What serves the United States better? A company that follows a business development plan determined by its management team and thus demonstrates the superiority of American democratic capitalism or one that makes decisions based upon the desires of some of its end users?
• Does Google's charitable foundation, located here, balance out criticism such as yours?

For the above, former, former, and different topic altogether.

I have a hard time with people who fly around in their private jets telling me that I am polluting too much.

Google could have easily changed their web page for US IP addresses to show some respect for Memorial Day and Veteran's Day. My perception, and the perceptions of others, is that it was anti-George Bush slam at the expense of those who have given all for them to have the chance to have a company like that. If you make a point of changing your front page as part of a statement and ignore US patriotic holidays, what statement are you making?

• http://www.searchenginejournal.com/w...n-the-us/6967/
• http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=55900
• http://littlegreenfootballs.com/webl...orial_Day&only
• http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...65,print.story

They did finally change it...
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/020074.html


I very well may be incorrect, but my perception is that Google respects the US Military less than the average US company does. If you are in the military while working at Microsoft and get called up on duty, MS will pay the difference between your military salary and their salary. This happened to one guy 5 times. (I used to work for Microsoft, but no longer do).

My goal, as a guest to this site, is to be a good and respectful guest, so I will cease my end of the discussion.

[Razor]

Jim-Jim-poor misguided Jim, don't you understand these many instances of perceived slights are merely harmless, repetitive coincidence, much like the dozens upon dozens of terrorist incidents over the last 40 some odd years that have been carried out by members of a specific faith? Please refrain from drawing unfounded, biased conclusions from them.

How's that go again? "Fool me once, shame on you..."

[Richard]

I'm struggling with the logic of some of the arguments presented here and the implication that because a company - for unknown reason(s) - chose to not blatantly market a patriotic holiday like so many other businesses do - their perceived slight means they are {insert outrage of choice}.

The LA Times article is enlightening - especially the final paragraph.

We have a bastard Patriotism, a sarcasm, a burlesque; but we have no such thing as a public conscience. Politically we are just a joke.
- Mark Twain

Richard's $.02

[LibraryLady]

Originally Posted by Richard

This is one I frequently find of use:

http://www.37.com/

Richard

If you like using metasearch engines, try http://www.dogpile.com/- bonus - they are very patriotic and have great graphics on holidays.

LL

[Razor]

Originally Posted by Richard

I'm struggling with the logic of some of the arguments presented here...

I'm no intelligence analyst, but I do recall a course or two where I learned that a pattern of specific behavior over a period of time often constituted a concious intent.

[Sigaba]

In addition to the topic raised in the OP, the article below also talks about China's ongoing disregard for intellectual property rights.

Source is here.

January 13, 2010
Google, Citing Attack, Threatens to Exit China
By ANDREW JACOBS and MIGUEL HELFT

This article was reported by Andrew Jacobs, Miguel Helft and John Markoff and written by Mr. Jacobs.

BEIJING — Google said Tuesday that it would stop cooperating with Chinese Internet censorship and consider shutting down its operations in the country altogether, citing assaults from hackers on its computer systems and China’s attempts to “limit free speech on the Web.”

The move, if followed through, would be a highly unusual rebuke of China by one of the largest and most admired technology companies, which had for years coveted China’s 300 million Web users.

Since arriving here in 2006 under an arrangement with the government that purged its Chinese search results of banned topics, Google has come under fire for abetting a system that increasingly restricts what citizens can read online.

Google linked its decision to sophisticated cyberattacks on its computer systems that it suspected originated in China and that were aimed, at least in part, at the Gmail user accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

Those attacks, which Google said took place last week, were directed at some 34 companies or entities, most of them in Silicon Valley, California, according to people with knowledge of Google’s investigation into the matter. The attackers may have succeeded in penetrating elaborate computer security systems and obtaining crucial corporate data and software source codes, though Google said it did not itself suffer losses of that kind.

While the scope of the hacking and the motivations and identities of the hackers remained uncertain, Google’s response amounted to an unambiguous repudiation of its own five-year courtship of the vast China market, which most major multinational companies consider crucial to their growth prospects. It is also likely to enrage the Chinese authorities, who deny that they censor the Internet and are accustomed to having major foreign companies adapt their practices to Chinese norms.

The company said it would try to negotiate a new arrangement to provide uncensored results on its search site, google.cn. But that is a highly unlikely prospect in a country that has the most sweeping Web filtering system in the world. Google said it would otherwise cease to run google.cn and would consider shutting its offices in China, where it employs some 700 people, many of them highly compensated software engineers, and has an estimated $300 million in annual revenue.

Google executives declined to discuss in detail their reasons for overturning their China strategy. But despite a costly investment, the company has a much smaller share of the search market here than it does in other major markets, commanding only about one in three searches by Chinese. The leader in searches, Baidu, is a Chinese-run company that enjoys a close relationship with the government.

Google executives have privately fretted for years that the company’s decision to censor the search results on google.cn, to filter out topics banned by Chinese censors, was out of sync with the company’s official motto, “Don’t be evil.”

“We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all,” David Drummond, senior vice president for corporate development and the chief legal officer, said in a statement.

Wenqi Gao, a spokesman for the Chinese Consulate in New York, said he did not see any problems with google.cn. “I want to reaffirm that China is committed to protecting the legitimate rights and interests of foreign companies in our country,” he said in a phone interview.

In China, search requests that include words like “Tiananmen Square massacre” or “Dalai Lama” come up blank. In recent months, the government has also blocked YouTube, Google’s video-sharing service.

While Google’s business in China is now small, analysts say that the country could soon become one of the most lucrative Internet and mobile markets, and a withdrawal would significantly reduce Google’s long-term growth.

“The consequences of not playing the China market could be very big for any company, but particularly for an Internet company that makes its money from advertising,” said David B. Yoffie, a Harvard Business School professor. Mr. Yoffie said advertising played an even bigger role in the Internet in China than it did in the United States. At the time of its arrival, the company said that it believed that the benefits of its presence in China outweighed the downside of being forced to censor some search results here, as it would provide more information and openness to Chinese citizens. The company, however, has repeatedly said that it would monitor restrictions in China.

Google’s announcement Tuesday drew praise from free speech and human rights advocates, many of whom had criticized the company in the past over its decision to enter the Chinese market despite censorship requirements.

“I think it’s both the right move and a brilliant one,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a legal scholar at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Rebecca MacKinnon, a fellow at the Open Space Institute and an expert on the Chinese Internet, said that Google had endured repeated harassment in recent months and that by having operations in China it potentially risked the security of its users in China. She said many Chinese dissidents used Gmail because its servers are hosted overseas and that it offered extra encryption.

“Unless they turn themselves into a Chinese company, Google could not win,” she said. “The company has clearly put its foot down and said enough is enough.”

In the past year, Google has been increasingly constricted by the Chinese government. In June, after briefly blocking access nationwide to its main search engine and other services like Gmail, the government forced the company to disable a function that lets the search engine suggest terms. At the time, the government said it was simply seeking to remove pornographic material from the company’s search engine results.

Some company executives suggested then that the campaign was a concerted effort to stain Google’s image. Since its entry into China, the company has steadily lost market share to Baidu.

Google called the attacks highly sophisticated. In the past, such electronic intrusions have either exploited the practice of “phishing,” to persuade unsuspecting users to allow their computers to be compromised, or exploited vulnerabilities in software programs permitting the attacks to gain control of systems remotely. Once they have taken over a target computer, it is possible to search for specific documents.

People familiar with the investigation into the attacks said they were aimed at source code repositories at high-tech companies. Source code is the original programmer’s instructions used to develop software programs and can provide both economic advantages as well as insight into potential security vulnerabilities.

In its public statement Google pointed to a United States government report prepared by the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission in October and an investigation by Canadian researchers that revealed a vast electronic spying operation last March.

The Canadian researchers discovered that digital documents had been stolen via the Internet from hundreds of government and private organizations around the world from computer systems based in China.

Andrew Jacobs reported from Beijing, and Miguel Helft and John Markoff from San Francisco. David Barboza contributed reporting from Shanghai, and Jonathan Ansfield from Beijing.

[Paslode]

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/...ording-google/

Jeremy A. Kaplan

- FOXNews.com

- January 25, 2010
Exclusive: Islam Is ... Finally Being Fixed on Google

A glitch in the "don't be evil" company's search engine appeared to censor searches for information about Islam. And after nearly three weeks, the company is finally fixing the problem.

After nearly three weeks, Google is finally repairing a glitch that hid search suggestions for the phrase "Islam is," which had led some to conclude that Google -- whose mantra is "don't be evil" -- had been censoring its search results.

A Google spokesman tells FoxNews.com that "the bug fix is in the process of rolling out, and suggestions will be visible within the next few days." Twitter comments from readers across the country confirm Google's statement; reports from Florida, Ohio, New Jersey, Georgia and more concur that the fix is rolling out across the country.

When FoxNews.com had asked Google for an explanation on Jan. 8, a company spokesman explained that the weird absence of results was just a software problem: "This is in fact a bug and we're working to fix it as quickly as we can." But the company would not respond to requests for clarification, nor would it offer a timeline for repairing the problem.

And until this morning, nearly three weeks had elapsed without a patch for the glitch, which clearly turned out to be more complex than initially assumed. When asked this morning for an estimated repair date for the bug, a Google spokesman would say only that the company was working on a fix, adding that "this is not an editorial thing."

Meanwhile, the other major search engines continued to return a wealth of results about what Islam may be. Bing and MSN both suggest that "Islam is the light," while Yahoo proposes that "Islam is the way of life." And Ask.com coyly points out that "Islam is the light, doll."

Our initial report on the "Islam is" bug generated a firestorm of controversy among FoxNews.com readers.

cncfan wrote, "I quit using Google last year, got fed up with their censor and promoting their left-leaning ideas." And Jerzyboy commented, "This is just one more 'flag' that Internet search engines have a lot of power to steer public opinion. Let's hope that Bing et-al offer a way to diversify results and get away from the bias of Google or anyone else."

mark.msjacobs and others sided with Google on the issue: "Since the results for Mohammed yield some pretty negative stuff, I'll give Google the benefit of the doubt on this one."

According to Google's Web site, the query suggestions that appear as you type are drawn from from searches you've done (if you're logged in), searches done by users all over the world, sites in the search index and ads in Google's network.

The company also explains that "We try to filter out suggestions that include pornographic terms, dirty words and hate and violence terms. If you encounter a term that should not be suggested, please let us know by posting in the Google Web Search Help Forum."

Many quirky items do make their way through the filters, however. Search for "can j" and the first suggestion asks, "Can Jesus microwave a burrito?" The bizarre metaphysical question is a reference to "The Simpsons" TV show, where Homer Simpson once asked, "Can Jesus microwave a burrito so hot even he could not eat it?"

An intriguing corollary: Google does offer search suggestions for future tense queries as well. Search for "Christianity will" and Google suggests "Christianity will end, it will disappear," and "Christianity will end." Input the same query about Islam and Google notes that "Islam will dominate the world" and "Islam will destroy Europe."

[Richard]

And while we hyper-focus elsewhere...

Richard

In Digital Combat, U.S. Finds No Easy Deterrent
John Markoff, David Sanger and Thom Shanker, NYT, 25 Jan 2010

On a Monday morning earlier this month, top Pentagon leaders gathered to simulate how they would respond to a sophisticated cyberattack aimed at paralyzing the nation’s power grids, its communications systems or its financial networks.

The results were dispiriting. The enemy had all the advantages: stealth, anonymity and unpredictability. No one could pinpoint the country from which the attack came, so there was no effective way to deter further damage by threatening retaliation. What’s more, the military commanders noted that they even lacked the legal authority to respond — especially because it was never clear if the attack was an act of vandalism, an attempt at commercial theft or a state-sponsored effort to cripple the United States, perhaps as a prelude to a conventional war.

What some participants in the simulation knew — and others did not — was that a version of their nightmare had just played out in real life, not at the Pentagon where they were meeting, but in the far less formal war rooms at Google Inc. Computers at Google and more than 30 other companies had been penetrated, and Google’s software engineers quickly tracked the source of the attack to seven servers in Taiwan, with footprints back to the Chinese mainland.

After that, the trail disappeared into a cloud of angry Chinese government denials, and then an ugly exchange of accusations between Washington and Beijing. That continued Monday, with Chinese assertions that critics were trying to “denigrate China” and that the United States was pursuing “hegemonic domination” in cyberspace.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/wo...er=rss&emc=rss

[The Reaper]

Maybe we should assess and select the best hackers in the US and give them funding and access to non-attribitionally "play" with the Chinese systems.

You play with the bull, you get the horns.

Naah, no balls for that. Let's just hope it never happens.

TR

[Richard]

I wonder if the Chinese watched Die Hard IV, too.

Richard's $.02

[Marina]

Originally Posted by Sigaba

In addition to the topic raised in the OP, the article below also talks about China's ongoing disregard for intellectual property rights.

It looks like Google is OK with political self-censorship of its content for you and me, but it's not OK with the Chinese telling them what to censor.

Google to shut China search engine

Google has drawn up detailed plans for the closure of its Chinese search engine and is now “99.9 per cent” certain to go ahead as talks over censorship with the Chinese authorities have reached an apparent impasse, according to a person familiar with the company’s thinking.

In a hardening of positions on both sides, the Chinese government also on Friday threw down a direct public challenge to the US search company, with a warning that it was not prepared to compromise on internet censorship to stop Google leaving.

The signs that Google was on the brink of closing Google.cn, its local search service in China, came two months after it promised to stop bowing to censorship there. But while a decision could be made very soon, the company is likely to take some time to follow through with the plan as it seeks an orderly closure and takes steps to protect local employees from retaliation by the authorities, the person familiar with its position said.

[COLOR="rgb(0, 255, 255)"]Google is also seeking ways to keep its other operations in China going, although some executives fear that a backlash from the Chinese authorities could make it almost impossible to keep a presence in the country.
[/COLOR]
When the search giant first promised to end censorship in response to what it claimed were a series of cyber-attacks mounted from inside China, many China-watchers warned that its public defiance of Beijing would provoke a stern response.

On Friday, Li Yizhong, minister for industry and information technology, said: “If [Google] takes steps that violate Chinese laws, that would be unfriendly, that would be irresponsible, and they would have to bear the consequences.”

One person close to the search company, meanwhile, said that its senior executives remained “adamant” about ending the censorship. The company has also ruled out keeping the search service going by handing majority control, or even the entire business, to a local player, this person said.

Google’s executives have made it clear that they still hope to stay in the country, whatever the fate of Google.cn. “It’s very important to know we are not pulling out of China,” Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, told the Financial Times at the time. “We have a good business in China. This is about the censorship rules, not anything else.”

The company’s other operations, which pre-date the launch of Google.cn four years ago, include its research centre in Beijing and a sales force that sells advertising on the Chinese-language Google.com search service, based outside China, to advertisers inside the country.

Mr Li encouraged Google to continue its operations in the country. “[Google] has taken 30 per cent of the Chinese search market.

“If you don’t leave, China will welcome that, if you don’t leave, it will be beneficial for the development of the internet in China.”