Google.cn Still Remains In China 103
hackingbear writes "Google appears to be content to remain in China doing business as usual while it finds a way to work within the system, according to one of the search giant's founders. This despite a strong statement 30 days ago that it would stop censoring search results in China and possibly pull its business out of that country. And the company is still unwilling to confirm or deny if the alleged attacks were carried out by the Chinese government. 'I don't actually think the question of whether [the attacks were performed by] the Chinese government is that important,' Brin said. (That's the difference between state-sponsor vs. individual hacking. Why is that not important?) In the mean time, shortly after we celebrated google.cn lifting censorship, the exact same censorship has been quietly re-enabled as proved by this Chinese search query on June 4, despite the lack of any concrete actions by the Chinese government, which has so far made only useless general and standard statements on the matter."
That didn't take long. (Score:4, Insightful)
And here we thought Google had a strong backbone to stand up to china. Apparently not.
Re:That didn't take long. (Score:5, Funny)
Who really thought that?
Of course they aren't going to pull out. People here are like the 18 year old girls who seriously trust that their boyfriend is going to pull out just before instead of cumming in.
Re:That didn't take long. (Score:4, Funny)
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Google has never purchased a jumbo jet, and neither have it's founders.
The two founders bought a 767 back in 2005. They then had an argument over the kind of beds to put in it [theregister.co.uk]. Starting a post with a factual inaccuracy in a paragraph by itself isn't usually a good start.
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Google has never purchased a jumbo jet, and neither have it's founders.
The two founders bought a 767 back in 2005. They then had an argument over the kind of beds to put in it [theregister.co.uk]. Starting a post with a factual inaccuracy in a paragraph by itself isn't usually a good start.
It's not a factual inaccuracy. The Boeing 767 is a widebody jet, but not a jumbo.The photos immediately above, or a few seconds of fact checking, show the difference. The Google jet is a smaller 767, the 767-200. They bought it from Qantas airlines, who would have carried 180 passengers on it, and the Google refit can board 50. The Boeing 747 is a jumbo jet and can carry about 500 passengers because it is a significantly larger plane.
Not that I see anything evil in buying a plane, nor do I imagine that
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The Boeing 767 is a widebody jet, but not a jumbo.
I've never heard an official definition of what constitutes a jumbo jet, but Wikipedia defines it as a synonym for wide-body jet. Perhaps you could point to an authoritative definition of the term.
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I don't care what goes on behind the scenes. I care about the end result. And this end result, while unsurprising, sucks.
Google's soul is still sold, and they haven't reduced their evil level one bit. So sad.
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Maybe the Chinese government asked them to continue operations to help lure out the attackers?
Maybe so, but I couldn't think of anything less relevant. The problem with China isn't the hacking, it's the censorship and oppression.
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And here we thought Google had a strong backbone to stand up to china. Apparently not.
As much as I despise censorship... I respect the fact the cooperations cannot dictate politics in China...
Google shouldn't have to stand up to the Chinese government, the Chinese people should... And probably will... My guess is they're not ready yet...
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Meaning, the people are in beta?
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This was for Google a strategic blunder of epic proportions. Never go on the attack if you can't follow up on it. Before this all happened, China had to consider the possibility that Google would pull out or refuse to censor, but now China knows that Google will bow to their every wish. Good going!
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Re:That didn't take long. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's because the summary is terrible, and so is the person who wrote it, and also the Slashdot editors, for posting it.
The usage of "despite" here would suggest there's some sort of contradiction betweeen these sentences, however Google's original post said:
Which is to say, the lack of obvious action thus far isn't particularly notable. When it's been half a year and there's been no further news, then you can start bitching, but not now.
And this part is just outright false. They were never disabled in the first place, as noted even by several comments in the article that was linked to there. Furthermore, Google's announcement never said anything like that they'd be immediately removing the censorship.
Basically, there's nothing of note here and anyone whining about how Google hasn't pulled out and uncensored their search engine and organized an elite team to overthrow the oppressive Chinese government and given everyone on Earth their own personal unicorn has gotten vastly inflated expectations due to poor reading comprehension.
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And this part is just outright false. They were never disabled in the first place, as noted even by several comments in the article that was linked to there. Furthermore, Google's announcement never said anything like that they'd be immediately removing the censorship.
Yea, I remember there was a lot of confusion over this, partly because English-language searches were never censored.
Not really a surprise. (Score:1)
Pussies n/t (Score:2)
-Filter prevention-
Too expensive to not be evil (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously not being evil is too expensive... maybe that explains the amount of evil in the world in general.
Re:Too expensive to not be evil (Score:5, Interesting)
Obviously not being evil is too expensive.
It could also be, "Leave and we'll kill your family." Or economic threats, or they could have threatened anyone who ever worked in the China offices with arrest and prosecution, they have a lot of ugly tools at their disposal. Probably not, but when you're dealing with a government you don't always know the whole story.
I'm just saying it's a little early to condemn Google before we get more facts.
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I don't know if China would mistreat former Google employees if Google simply left. But I'd say there's a darned good chance they would detain and otherwise mistreat Google employees if Goog
Re:Too expensive to not be evil (Score:5, Informative)
Foreign executives being arrested for political reasons? [time.com] Sounds like they should be clamoring over each other on the roof to get a spot on the last chopper out of Beijing. Not a slow scaling-back of operations.
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Foreign executives being arrested for political reasons? [time.com]
And detained without charge for over 6 months. It was just last week, charges were layed.
The gutless Australian goverment did little for fear of upsetting a huge trading partner.
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I would assume Google to be a very smart business with smart advisors.
In that apparent absence let me provide said advice as it seems to difficult for google to see...
1. Silently step down services
2. If questioned, purport not reading highly intelligent population & user Trends
3. Leave, w/o press release.
4. ???
5. Take potential profit hit on the chin.
"I'm just saying it's a little early to condemn Google before we get more facts"
Nah. They
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I still hope that negotiation is happening and its result will comfort us that the "don't be evil" motto is a bit more that a motto but I am growing delusional day after day...
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So in summary... (Score:2)
Uh (Score:4, Insightful)
Aren't these submissions supposed to be moderated to keep these walls of partially intelligible text off the main page?
Right. (Score:4, Insightful)
Top businesspeople in company overrule moral arguments from staff in order to ensure future profits.
News at eleven.
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Bad Move (Score:5, Insightful)
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Google is at least as immune from criticism as Microsoft, at this point, and they know it.
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Bad move? Really? What are people going to do about it if Google chooses to be evil? Stop using Google? Seriously? Does anyone here go a single day without using Google a dozen times at least?
Actually, yes, I have been doing without Google for a couple of years now. I started weaning off when Google started censoring their Chinese search engine in the first place.
Admittedly, I do wish Google wouldn't be evil, because they have nice tools, but between the censorship, spying, and throwing their weight around like the monopolist they are striving to be, I have no hope that they'll be any different than any other huge corporation.
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Does anyone here go a single day without using Google a dozen times at least? Can even the technically-adept people here get along easily without it? How about the other 95% of web users?
Well, I use Google quite extensively (lemme think, Gmail, Maps, Reader, Calendar, Documents, and general search). If I decided today that Google was Teh Evil, could I get away? Let's see:
Gmail: easy - I use it mainly as an aggregator for my "real" accounts (almost nothing comes addressed to the gmail account), and because of the nice web interface. Turn off the forwarding, pick everything up in PortableApps-Thunderbird. (Or I could use my host's inferior webmail, as a backup plan).
Maps/Earth: I'd miss these
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Does anyone here go a single day without using Google a dozen times at least?
Absolutely. I can't even use Google by accident by following a link as their entire domain and all of their subsidiary's domains that I know of are completely blocked from my network.
This has had virtually no impact whatsoever on my existence. There are plenty of replacements for everything they do.
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it's going to make everyone question if Google can be trusted. Can they?
No.
This has been another episode of short answers to easy questions.
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In 6 months 99% of Google's customers wont remember this. It was too expensive for them to pull out, i'm honestly surprised they said they were going to in the first place..
Mixed results (Score:5, Informative)
It's true that the tank man does not rank number one on "tiananmen" as it does on google.com - but if I type tiananmen into the search box, the top suggestions are
tiananmen square protest
tiananmen square 1989
tiananmen square tank
tiananmen tank
tiananmen square tank man
tiananmen tank man
And if I make the search more specific by adding "tank", I do get a few copies of the infamously censored image on page 1, even on Google.cn.
Of course, I haven't digged this deeply before, so I don't know if the censorship was always this half-assed.
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PS: I can only use image search to check up on google.cn censorship, obviously, because I can't read Chinese.
But you are doing the search from a Chinese IP? (Score:2, Interesting)
Google knows if your origin IP is chinese. I'm sure you get different results for google.cn if you are in china or out.
is chinese for 'tank man' .... (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.google.cn/search?hl=zh-CN&source=hp&q=&btnG=Google+&aq=f&oq=
get's you the images of the tank man.
When will Slashdot stop censoring Chinese? (Score:1, Insightful)
and all the other languages that aren't written in ASCII. Unicode has been around for twenty years FFS.
PS It's really annoying when (Score:1)
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Not Mixed Results, obvious censorship.
I search "tiananmen square tank" on google.com, go to images, I get over 100 images.
I search "tiananmen square tank" on google.cn, go to images, I get over 1 images, which when clicked on, gets me a curt line of chinese text, instead of whatever page that image came from.
So there is nothing mixed about it, google is censoring chinese communications on behalf of the chinese government. There is no doubt in my mind they do, and will continue to do whatever Chinese , U.S
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It could just be that the newly uncensored results are still inheriting their lame PageRank standings that got choked by censorship.
Try "tiananmen square massacre pictures" (Score:1)
Try that query then look at the results. Compare the results from the query between google.cn and google.com. It's censored. Sad.
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I wonder how you got that. I am accessing from Japan and I couldn't get any of those, whether searching in Mandarin or in English (using the search terms you used).
At the end of the search there is the usual "some results are not shown to comply with the local rules and regulations" (in Mandarin).
So I call shenanigan on the results you obtained.
As a fan for Google, I am very disappointed.
Doing a deal with the devil (Score:2, Insightful)
Doing business with a country where freedom of information is counter productive to your business model makes no sense.
when money is God WHO CARES RIGHT?
Re: Google.cn Still Remains in China (Score:5, Funny)
Well, yeah...
Where else would you put it?
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Where else would you put what?
My guess: (Score:3, Insightful)
Some special Chinese agent made a visit at Brin’s house at night, reminding him that they could make him disappear “just like that”.
I hope not. But it would not surprise me a bit if this was how it happened.
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Incorrect information in the summary (Score:1, Interesting)
Take a closer look at the source of that information. Google didn't lift the censorship and then re-enable it. Who was the source claiming that the censorship had already been lifted? If you look on the source that the slashdot article cites, that source says the rumors about the censorship having been lifted already were not correct. So, it seems no changes have been made to the search results yet. Did Google ever make a statement about how long time the
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There were postings at the time showing search results from google.cn as queried from China.
The censorship was not there.
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The summary discloses the filter has been re-enabled since it was transiently lift. That can be verified by going to google.cn and do a search in Chinese. It does not counter google's claim of "will leave".
There is no substantial report of exactly which department the company is negotiating with, and from Chinese news sources oversea or in Hong Kong, some departments came out and denied [wikipedia.org] any negotiation on going or that the company has made any formal complain. One would expect the government agency to act
Not important? WTF? (Score:1)
So Brin now says that it's not important, whether or not the Chinese gov't is behind the attack? WTF? Of course it's important, it makes all the difference in the world if this is state sponsored. And I thought Google was growing a spine, apparently not. Move along, nothing to see here...
Google, you are quickly losing any respect I had left for you.
Bill Gates bats for totalitarian POV (Score:1, Interesting)
The buck stops in China evidently... (Score:3, Interesting)
Not that I was expecting any better from them. Too much money involved. Still, doesn't stop me from being disappointed anyhow.
Yes, but WHY? (Score:2)
Given: the summary is correct. Why might Google do this? The tone of the summary seems to accuse them of doing so, and that this is bad, with 'proof' being statements taken out of context and placed within the context which is being implied. But you can't get from thesis to QED without some logical connections more than "we say so".
The Chinese (gov't.; from the ministry of defense offices) have been attacking private (initially US and UK based Falun Gong and Free Tibet sites) and government web sites and ot
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Censorship? Here comes a clue. Catch: Most of the people in China want it.
...according to government-sponsored polls, reported by state-run media. And Sadaam won re-election with 100% of the vote.
you can prove yourselves hypocrites by supporting what amounts to subversion of the government of the world's largest nation.
Why would NOT supporting an authoritarian government like China make us hypocrites? Most people who live in representative governments value personal rights and freedom, not slavish obedience to governmental authority. As a simple example: people cannot sell themselves into slavery (see: inalienable rights [wikipedia.org]), as this would violate their natural rights, even by their own consent.
And last we looked, China was an ally no less than Israel
We spy
War of Internet Addiction (Score:1)
Check out the WoW machinima --it's had resonance far beyond the gaming community.
http://digicha.com/?p=125 [digicha.com]
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA (Score:1, Funny)
All you morons who thought Google would actually cause China to cave and not the other way around, how does that crow taste?
Also, what a retarded article summary, clearly if they didn't follow our laws we were going to kick them out of China, the "concrete action" the summary refers to. The implicit threat of this was obviously enough for them to
I'm very glad that Sergey Brin realized this (Score:1)
Lots of multinationals have this problem. (Score:3, Interesting)
Imagine if this wasn't censorship of search results that we were talking about. Instead, imagine that the Chinese government looked the other way while local officials demanded bribes for keeping the office utilities running. If you're a multinational company, those are the kind of things you need to deal with...and reconcile with a different set of ethics.
Companies need to decide whether or not they are willing to play by the local rules when they jump into an international market. Those bribes they pay may not be a good ethical choice, but they may make the company much more profitable. Since company shareholders are the only concern for most companies, they need to set aside their feelings and do what the local government says.
Personally, I think what they're doing is fine, simply because it's not our place to tell a foriegn government what to do. It's their country, and human rights abuses, censorship, Taiwan and the Dalai Lama shouldn't really matter to American citizens. That's how China chooses to keep their country in line (and growing economically at 10%+ per year, I might add.) It seems to work well for them, and even if it didn't, we can't tell them otherwise. Doing so puts us on the same Cold War era "keeping the world safe for democracy" bandwagon that hasn't worked for us in four wars since WW2. I've long held the belief that once we solve 100% of our social problems at home, then we can go lecture people around the world about how to behave.
Why do people care what google.cn says? (Score:1)
Isn't the important thing what Google.cn returns for someone in the USA, it's what it returns for someone in China. Why would the censoring be done by site rather than by querying IP?
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Oops... I need a do-over:
The important thing isn't what Google.cn returns for someone in the USA, it's what it returns for someone in China. Why would the censoring be done by site rather than by querying IP?
Google Reality Check (Score:2, Insightful)
In doing so they have to do things like bow to the Chinese, track all of your searches, etc. It's business folks!
Unfortunately that also means that "do no evil", is more of a guideline than a rule. Maybe they should change their motto to "We do less evil than everyone else"
Really I'm amazed that anyone is surprised by this.
Re:Google Reality Check (Score:5, Interesting)
Google, as a publicly traded company, has only one obligation: to make a profit for shareholders.
That's not necessarily true. A publicly-traded corporations primary obligation isn't to make a profit, it's to fulfill the goals laid out in the articles of incorporation and the prospectus that defined the public offering. In most cases, those documents say that the primary goal of the corporation is to make a profit, and that, then, is what the company's directors must focus on doing. But there are plenty of corporations, especially non-profits and for-profits that have a "social good" agenda, with different goals, and the directors of those corporations would be failing in their duty to their shareholders if they focused on profit at the expense of their stated goals.
Was "Don't be evil" part of Google's corporate charter? And if so, was it given an equal or higher priority than profitability? I don't know, but if so, then Google's directors have a legal obligation to abide by it.
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Someone mod parent up.
Thank you.
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Have you ever drafted articles of incorporation and filed them to create a corporation? I have, and while you're certainly right that the primary goal of most businesses is to make money, the founders of a corporation are free to put whatever goals they like in the articles. Those goals are then carried over to the prospectus provided to potential investors in an IPO, and they define what the potential shareholders expect the company to do.
Both the articles of incorporation and the IPO prospectus are le