Google.cn Has Already Lifted Censorship 300
An anonymous reader writes "In an update to Google's withdrawal from China, there are reports that censorship has already been lifted. It's probably taken a while to report because of Google's ranking system." Just a warning that the language on that blog post is NSFW but it does provide evidence.
I only hope (Score:5, Insightful)
Google's expat employees are now out of China.
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Google's expat employees are now out of China.
Yeah I think the Chinese government will now cease all property that belongs to Google, send all employees to work camps, and then will start a full scale war on the US. I mean, what do they have to loose? When Google is gone, China will collapse anyway, so they might as well go with a good blast.
Re:I only hope (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah I think the Chinese government will now cease all property that belongs to Google, send all employees to work camps......
You mean like Stern Hu, the Australian executive for Rio Tinto, who has been held by the Chinese since July 5, 2009?
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601081&sid=aq9DMlCuW45M [bloomberg.com]
Re:I only hope (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I only hope (Score:5, Informative)
Gimmie more of that Chinese justice!
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They don't give black people chicken McNuggets!" http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,504125,00.html
If I paid for my meal and they tell me they ran out of whatever it is that I ordered, and they won’t refund my money? yeah, I’d be a little pissed too.
I mean, sure, I might order something else and not worry about it, but if I only wanted what I ordered and not whatever else is available, they damn well better give me my money back.
“All sales are final” means no refunds or exchanges, but if they didn’t fulfill their end of the transaction then the sale hasn’t been finaliz
Re:I only hope (Score:5, Funny)
Will they need a seize and desist order?
Nothing, it's clearly a tight situation.
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They've managed for over 4000 years. I think they'll manage without Google for a little while longer.
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It surprises me how fast they have regrown an educated class after killing so many back in the 50's.
And now PHD's are going back to China. I guess they don't think it will happen again.
There is a lot of racial patriotism in china. One of the best things that could happen there is a lot of immigrants and intermarriage to break up that meme- I think it's potentially dangerous the way aryanism was.
Re:I only hope (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: SpellCheck II (Score:3, Funny)
Is any one working on this? With all the excess capacity in the hardware, a software upgrade is overdue. Seems like a viable product to me.
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Hey don't laugh. It could be very helpful to use an MS-office style (Does OO.org do it too? I hardly use office apps anymore) green squiggly to highlight potential errors or areas that could be improved - light up "seize and desist" "win or loose" "for all intensive purposes", etc and it could make a huge difference to the spelling/grammar/writing-impaired.
Maybe... But do we want everyone to have that sort of power?
Spelling, word comprehension, and sentence structure can all add a veneer of validity; and particularly in the case of online posts that veneer can make a big impression.
I appreciate seeing bad grammar online the same way I appreciate the presence of racism in political discussions. Sometimes it nice to have a big flag pointing out those who either don't have a clue or aren't willing to place thought before speech.
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I don't speak Chinese, but it seems not to be censored. For instance, the last line on this results page [google.cn] says (putting it through Google Translate) "According to local laws, regulations and policies, some search results are not shown".
(The query is for Tienanmen Square, I think, which I used Wikipedia to "translate". The google.com.hk [google.com.hk] results for the same query are very different).
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The idea is that previously had you searched for TS on google.cn you would not have found any results related to the protests. The image supplied shows that a very famous and previously censored image does now show up on the .cn version of google. As mentioned page rank will still rank those pages very low, however, they are no longer censored.
I Don't Think Censorship's Been Lifted (Score:5, Interesting)
It's probably taken a while to report because of Google's ranking system.
I don't understand how this explains it. The searches shown have very low results for the offensive images? I don't think Google would be foolish enough to remove values from their page ranking system or fiddle with those numbers. Rather it would seem much more intuitive to build an interface that filters designated problem links and images. It's probably even automated for some bullshit arm of the Chinese government (who the devil is it these days? The Ministry of Culture?) that can go into a web portal and just add images and domains and pages to a list of restrictions. Maybe even the government is savvy enough to have an feed or service that gives this information out to companies to assure compliance and ease of compliance? A simpler answer is that a few new sites popped up and the government just hasn't added them to the no-no list yet. If you look at the URLs in the images, they are from blogspot.com which means they're probably new blogs that need to be individually blocked by the Chinese government and/or Google. What you're probably seeing is lazy censorship or the latency of an adequate solution for censorship -- which is pretty much as defective by design as it gets. I don't think "lifts" censorship is what's going on here or else Google would be looking at losing business to one sixths of the world's population. While Google professes 'do no evil' they still have shareholders to satisfy.
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What /. needs to do is start censoring big walls of text.
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Not without pictures.
FTFY
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What makes the most sense to you? That Google announces that they lifted censorship while purposely keeping censorship on and just sliding an image or two in hoping the whole thing blows over before anyone notices or that like they say, that it takes a little bit for the ranking system to normalize
I know for a fact I've searched google.cn for Tienanmen square before and there was nothing about the massacre on the first page, and definitely no pictures of tanks, and now there is so I'm likely to believe the
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Who knows what the algorithm is but part of it is probably cross-links in the local language. Then probably pages that are searched for a lot by different users. This would also be low in China currently.
One of my girlfriends worked with a chinese lady who swore up and down that TS never happened. Even when confronted with web evidence and after living in the US for several years. So there is a fair amount of brainwashing going on at an early age.
FTFA (Score:2, Informative)
No cherry picking (Score:5, Informative)
Falun Gong (Score:5, Insightful)
There's still search differences though
http://www.google.cn/search?hl=zh-CN&q=falun+gong [google.cn]
is quite different to
http://www.google.com/search?hl=zh-CN&q=falun+gong [google.com]
Though either does a lot better than Yahoo!
http://search.cn.yahoo.com/s?p=falun+gong&v=web&pid=ysearch [yahoo.com]
Re:Falun Gong (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, http://www.google.se/search?hl=zh-CN&q=falun+gong [google.se] returns yet another different result, at least when it comes to number of hits, so it might just be google trying to optimise for different regions.
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No, the available content is different:
Google USA
http://www.google.com/search?q=falun+gong+site%3Afalundafa.org [google.com]
Google China
http://www.google.cn/search?q=falun+gong+site%3Afalundafa.org [google.cn]
Google Sweden
http://www.google.se/search?q=falun+gong+site%3Afalundafa.org [google.se]
Google USA and Sweden do report different results, but at least they actually have results!
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I think the differences are because of the choice of language (e.g. promoting Swedish results on .se). I was comparing .com.hk and .co.uk, but when I added &hl=zh-CN to the .co.uk URL I got exactly the same results as given by .com.hk.
Re:Falun Gong (Score:5, Interesting)
Yahoo is especially interesting here. If you search for something innocuous like Hong Kong
http://search.cn.yahoo.com/search?p=Hong%20Kong [yahoo.com]
It works fine.
Change the search
http://search.cn.yahoo.com/search?p=Falun%20Gong [yahoo.com]
And yahoo.cn drops the connection, and seems to do so based on your IP for a few minutes thereafter.
Re:Falun Gong (Score:5, Informative)
That's how the Great Firewall tells you that something is "inappropriate." search.cn.yahoo.com is located in China, and the GFW is applied to all Internet traffic passing in/out of China, not just consumer machines, so it's not Yahoo that's blocking that particular term but the government.
This will work with any Mainland Chinese site, for example: http://www.mps.gov.cn/Falun%20Gong [mps.gov.cn]
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Cisco, our motto is the "Human Network". What we really mean is, the "Repress Humans Network". After all John Chambers needs his rogaine for that 3 hair comb over he sports, and that stuff isn't cheap! CVS Pharmacy started locking it up!
http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/4/30/163555.shtml [newsmax.com]
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http://images.google.cn/images?hl=zh-CN&resnum=0&q=tiananmen%20square
vs.
http://images.google.ca/images?hl=en&source=hp&q=tiananmen%20square
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I think the page rank algorithm favours pages linked within the country of the search server. If not many .cn sites link to www.falundafa.org, then that site will have a low page rank on google.cn.
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Thank god Yahoo is such a joke because their search results are particularly nasty. Not only do they not show results if you search for Falun Gong, but it will block you from doing ANY other searches (for a while) if you even try. Yahoo would be dangerous if they were a stronger company that anyone gave a shit about.
That's not Yahoo, that's the Great Firewall between you and Yahoo.cn. If you would be searching Google.com while in China for "Falun Gong", the Google connection would be reset as well, since the traffic would go through the "Golden Shield".
Megacorps (Score:2)
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> You know, a big business that has its own army and basically can control the
> government by military force.
There is a word for that. It is called a "government". The owner is usually referred to as "Dear Leader", "President for Life", or similar.
Re:Megacorps (Score:4, Insightful)
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A government is geographically limited. A big business can set up wherever it wants and, if sufficiently powerful, have its rules supersede the local laws. In many places in the world, corporations are more overtly powerful than governments.
Well, then it's a good thing capitalism == good, while government == bad! W00t! *high-fives*
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A government is geographically limited. A big business can set up wherever it wants and, if sufficiently powerful, have its rules supersede the local laws. In many places in the world, corporations are more overtly powerful than governments.
Err, well, for counter point see United States re: Iraq.
"A government can set up wherever it wants and, if sufficiently powerful, have its rules supersede local laws." That's usually known as "nation building" and we do it all the time.
Re:Megacorps (Score:4, Insightful)
A government that is sufficiently powerful can also set up wherever it wants, and have its rules supersede the local laws (both in the practical sense, and even further by simply replacing the government with one that will impose new laws more to the intruding government's liking -- or the intruding government can just displace the local government and assume the job for itself.) Historically, examples of this are quite common.
So, I would say that the contrast you draw is quite misguided.
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Who needs military to control the government when you've got cash?
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Cash is a tool of the government and becomes worthless once the government says it is.
Real power and property on the other hand doesn't disappear at the whims of a government.
Re:Megacorps (Score:4, Insightful)
from TFA:
"It's not Google leaving China, it's China leaving the world."
Germany still censored (Score:5, Interesting)
I wish our government would do something to piss Google off so that we could have uncensored search results (to be fair: In Germany we can just switch from the censored google.de to the uncensored google.com)
Re:Germany still censored (Score:5, Informative)
"In Germany we can just switch from the censored google.de to the uncensored google.com"
But you may need to add /ncr to the google url to avoid automatic country redirection depending on your location.
http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=873 [google.com]
Re:Germany still censored (Score:5, Funny)
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Censorship in Germany and many other European countries is done under the guise of "protecting the children" ("Jugendschutz").
Germany hasn't really learned from it's past and is heavily promoting censorship as a solution to all issues. For example, it is illegal to deny that the holocaust happened.
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In certain german jurisdictions, (perhaps all of them, by now) verifiable proof of age is required.
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Banning Youporn bolsters the red light district.
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Whoosh
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The censorship of neo nazi search I feel is an understandable cultural issue for Germany. It might even be a choice that Google made without government involvement. The fact that you can get around it so simply makes me think it is more of a statment of intent than evil censorship.
Just for arguments sake would it be evil for a search engine to self censor?
Just why would it be wrong for a search engine to decide to offer a "clean" search product that didn't have porn, neo nazi, and klan sites?
Wouldn't it jus
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Just for arguments sake would it be evil for a search engine to self censor?
Yes.
Just why would it be wrong for a search engine to decide to offer a "clean" search product that didn't have porn, neo nazi, and klan sites?
As long as the non-"clean" version remains easily accessible this would be not be wrong, it would be fine.
The issue here is who decides. If you voluntarily, as a personal choice, choose to use the clean search (e.g. in prefs turn Safe Search on) then there is no problem. If the company takes that choice from you, then that's a problem.
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I wish our government would do something to piss Google off so that we could have uncensored search results
You don't need that, all you need to do is build a local search engine that is more popular than Google (Baidu [baidu.com] in China). Google just doesn't want to play by the same rules anymore, since they lost.
Re:Germany still censored (Score:4, Insightful)
Good for you, Google (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Good for you, Google (Score:4, Interesting)
This is a mere trifle to the Chinese government. Real change will have to come from within China - when enough of them want a change in their government and way of life, they'll fight for it. Otherwise, there's really not much anyone can do that will improve things measurably.
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Didn't say it would be pleasant or fun. They might not even win.
But eventually, they might.
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Re:Good for you, Google (Score:5, Insightful)
when enough of them want a change in their government and way of life, they'll fight for it.
Exactly. And you know what? They don't want to change either.
Like it or not, the current government has lifted a billion people out of horrible poverty. Some are still poor, some are doing ok, but all of them are a lot better off than their parents or grandparents were. Even the definition of "poor" has changed. The "poor" chinese of today would have been considered well-off less than a hundred years ago.
And idealism aside, hunger trumps liberty.
Re:Good for you, Google (Score:4, Informative)
Even the definition of "poor" has changed. The "poor" chinese of today would have been considered well-off less than a hundred years ago.
I don't necessarily disagree with you on the other points, but it seems that this is largely true of the developed world...
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Ghandi was chinese?
Damn, my geography needs work...
A Business Decision? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's more likely that there were other business considerations that had already made Google feel like it was difficult to do business with China, and the censorship lift is just PR gravy.
Re:A Business Decision? (Score:5, Insightful)
News: Google enters China, censors results
Slashdot: This proves Google is an evil multinational company just after money!
News: Google uncensors results, leaves China.
Slashdot: Yet more evidence Google will do anything for money!
Slashdot mind... (Score:2)
'Slashdot' is currently trying to wrap its collective mind around the issue.
Your characterisation of it being of a single mind is a bit premature.
Furthermore, I have seem more (in number as well as in intelligence) comments commending Google's stance than disparaging it...
Re:A Business Decision? (Score:5, Informative)
Uh, they already said there were business considerations. Specifically, their systems, along with those of quite a few other large companies, were hacked in order to gain information about Chinese dissidents.
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Uncensored Tianenmen Square Images (Score:2)
I appreciate the warning over language, though it didn't look worse than other sites /. links to from my brief look. But there are (albeit thumbnailed) images of the Tiananmen Square massacre, which are probably more important to warn people about.
Also, the article has evidence that censorship has not ceased so YMMV with this story.
Images definitely still censored (Score:2)
Erm... Google images search for tiananmen square tank man in china:
http://images.google.cn/images?hl=en&safe=active&um=1&sa=1&q=tiananmen+square+tank+man&btnG=Search&aq=f&oq=&start=0 [google.cn]
And on google.co.uk:
http://images.google.co.uk/images?hl=en&safe=active&um=1&sa=1&q=tiananmen+square+tank+man&btnG=Search&aq=f&oq=&start=0 [google.co.uk]
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that's because it's "tiEnanmen", not "tiAnanmen"
http://images.google.cn/images?hl=zh-CN&safe=active&um=1&sa=1&q=tienanmen+square+tank+man&btnG=Google+%E6%90%9C%E7%B4%A2&aq=f&oq=&start=0 [google.cn]
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Google doesn't seem to think so - it asks "Did you mean: tiananmen square".
At least, I assume that's what the chinese is saying.
Are you suggesting that Google is wrong?! Unthinkable!
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Do No Evil (Score:5, Insightful)
I give them credit for not being evil (Score:4, Insightful)
Now they could just keep cooperating with the Chinese government to stay in business there. Most companies would probably do that rather than stand up for themselves and fight back. It helps themselves as much as it is a good thing to stand for.
They probably have many non-altruistic reasons for doing what they are doing. But I bet the thought of their image, or brand, and how it would look depending on what they do had an impact on what they decided. So by having the motto of "Don't be Evil", they actually become less evil. And if doing good things helps their image, and helps to make them money, then so-be-it. At least good things are being done rather than more of the status-quo of mostly evil.
Hurray Google!
No they haven't! (Score:2)
Just compare
the cn version [google.cn] with the one that the rest of the world [google.co.uk] sees
Re:No they haven't! (Score:5, Informative)
the chinese people refer to the tiananmen square protest as the june fourth incident [google.cn].
Google Just Can't Win (Score:5, Insightful)
No matter what it does, we are too distrustful of large MNCs to ever assume they are capable of actually making a principled stand that would run contrary to business interests. The Google narrative of the situation is fairly clear: one of the costs of doing business in China was to kowtow to government censorship demands (complying with Chinese law, as they comply with American law in America and German law in Germany). They felt it was wrong (or not) but claimed the greater evil would be to NOT enter the search market, leaving it to be dominated by companies who would have no qualms about censorship whatsoever (see Yahoo handing over IP addresses).
They later discovered they had no leverage; the good they could do by being able to provide search results that were clearly marked as "censored" was outweighed by the harm that could be done by leaked information, and they were unable to do anything (within the bounds of Chinese law) to prevent it. Thus, they reevaluated, and are considering exiting the market.
The alternative is that it is simply a business strategy switch: they discovered the market is unprofitable, and are exiting or some shit.
The problem with this is simple: even if we concede that Chinese consumers don't click or buy anything through Google ads, rendering their business model moot, Google needs the market share. The Chinese will not always be poor. There are huge number of middle class Chinese in cities with enough disposable income to make purchases. The revenue streams will grow over the years. If they cede the market to Baidu, by the time the Chinese are rich enough to afford to buy products online through ads, Google will have to enter the market as a new player with no market share to start. Not being a business analyst for google, I do not know exactly how many clicks they need to remain profitable in China. But given the huge numbers of urban Chinese with money to spare, and the impressive rate of growth, it will only be a matter of time before (urban) China catches up to Taiwan and Korea (and eventually Japan). When that happens, it will be a much more profitable market than the US and Europe.
While I'm inclined to distrust MNCs, it is possible that they really are trying to make a stand. Did anyone know/leak this before it was announced, making them fear a Yahoo-style shitstorm? Otherwise, it would have made more sense to keep it quiet, simply say there was an attack, and leave the targets of the attack unannounced, and then continue business as usual. But no matter what it does, it will be accused of simply following the money. But hey, props to google for trying, in my book.
Still censored, but don't care (Score:5, Interesting)
Err .. no it's not (Score:2)
When will they remove the US/European censorship (Score:2)
Stand by for Tank Guy to be wearing Google T-shirt (Score:2)
But seriously, even if true, this is going to last all of five minutes. Google has a losing hand against the Chinese government. The original press release did not say they lifted censorship. It said they would discuss the legality of "legal unfiltered results" which is clearly COMPLETELY IMPOSSIBLE if you have been paying any attention to the violent hermetic paranoia of China's government.
One of three things will probably occur:
Re:Stand by for Tank Guy to be wearing Google T-sh (Score:5, Insightful)
The original press release did not say they lifted censorship. It said they would discuss the legality of "legal unfiltered results"
you are 1/2 right. the quote is below,
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.
they haven't done it yet (at the time the blog was written), but they said they have decided that they will lift censorship, period. the decision was made. this is a pretty strong statement. if they backtracked on this, they would face a PR nightmare.
What about the other search engines (Score:2)
What say we lobby Steve Balmer and Carol Bartz (Yahoo!'s CEO) and see whether they have to cojones to fight against what is a very serious problem: Chinese state-funded black hats.
What I don't understand is that the West has made China what it is today. Why b
Amen brother (Score:2)
Oh yeah....Slastdot.org is a family site now, consisting of clean Ethical Apple Christian Hackers.
on troll dev/null
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To me, NSFW really only applies to something that would be visible and noticeable to someone walking past. “NSFW language” can’t really exist unless perhaps the typeface is so large that it’s easily readable to others. It’s not like I expect anyone to be reading over my shoulder, or not without me knowing it anyway.
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What about if the words are arranged as ascii porn?
Hilarious (Score:2)
Google announces that it will now display pictures of some guy's brain lying on the ground in Tiananmen Square, and while passing that on, Slashdot pre-warns people about "holy shit" being displayed on a workplace computer screen.
A high-expectation joke from good Mr. Taco?
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Not Safe For Work
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Even though I as a rule don't visit anything that would be deemed NSFW while at work, just the fear of something accidentally popping up and earning me that perp walk has convinced me to face my screen away from the door of my office. If someone walks in they have to walk around the desk before they can see what's up on the screen.
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If someone walks in they have to walk around the desk before they can see what's up on the screen.
Nope, I still can see what's on your screen, it's blurry though, look behind you, do you see me?
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To expand on this NSFW is used to mark anything that could get you fired reprimanded or flat out arrested
(anything that would be a career limiting move) significant nudity language above network primetime and medium or higher violence would be the highlights
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Well, I know that from now on, that is what I will be reading it as.
Re:Google siding w/"human rights activists" or not (Score:2)
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From what I read (outside of TFA) Google itself wasnt really hacked, just that Gmail accounts were broken into (which means their passwords were dictionary'd/guessed/phished).