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China Communications Google Government

Google Scales the Great Firewall, Falls Off 105 Minutes Later (techinasia.com) 71

Posted by msmash from the breaking-the-wall dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Citizens of mainland China unexpectedly found themselves with unfettered access to Google search late last night, commencing a golden age of censorship-free searching that lasted all of 105 minutes. For the duration of the film Edward Scissorhands, lasting from 11:30pm on Sunday to 1:15am on Monday morning, Google's search -- but not other services like Gmail or YouTube -- was unblocked
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Google Scales the Great Firewall, Falls Off 105 Minutes Later More

Google Scales the Great Firewall, Falls Off 105 Minutes Later

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  • Huh? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 28, 2016 @11:38AM (#51792545)

    What does Edward Scissor-hands have to do with this? :/

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by SeaFox ( 739806 )

      What does Edward Scissor-hands have to do with this? :/

      No search results got cut during that period of time?

    • We're supposed to understand to be kind to the submitter because they are Special.

  • I wonder (Score:3)

    by mdsolar ( 1045926 ) on Monday March 28, 2016 @11:44AM (#51792595) Homepage Journal
    How popular were searches on organ harvesting of Falun Gong members?

  • Great another unit of mesure (Score:3)

    by avandesande ( 143899 ) on Monday March 28, 2016 @11:48AM (#51792637) Journal
    It takes 3.5 edward scissorhandses for a library of congress to copy across the network a distance of 321 football fields.

  • Will look at logs and jail people who used it? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Monday March 28, 2016 @12:02PM (#51792755)

    Will look at logs and jail people who used it?

    • or what will the NSA do with data from all the searches from china during that time, faithfully handed over as usual, by almighty goog.

      • faithfully handed over as usual, by almighty goog.

        Cite?

        • maybe i should have said "eagerly handed over" given state department tool's at google,(ie current jared cohens ) desire to please usa gov even before asked.

          this was forwarded to hillary then secretary of state in 2012,
          "
          From: Jared Cohen [mailto
          Sent: Wednesday, July 25, 2012 1:21 PM
          To: Burns, William J; Sullivan, Jacob J; alec.ross
          Subject: Syria

          Deputy Secretary Burns, Jake, Alec,

          Please keep close hold, but my team is planning to launch a tool on Sunday that will publicly track and map the defections in S

          • I won't comment on that project, though I've heard Jared Cohen's side of the story and it's quite different from how it's being painted, but that has absolutely nothing to do with providing Google logs to the US government. That project just collected and mapped publicly-available information, nothing whatsoever from inside Google.

            • "That project just collected and mapped publicly-available information"
              everything above board and clean huh? that is why "keep this very close hold ", and let dictatorial but western client qatar royals owned " Al-Jazeera ... will take primary ownership"(al-jazeera that is famous for its pro sunni islamist militant coverage of news). huh?

              and why did google, "believed" "in encouraging more to defect and giving confidence to the opposition"? against a legitimate government under international law, and for an

              • "That project just collected and mapped publicly-available information" everything above board and clean huh? that is why "keep this very close hold "

                Because people freak out, I'm guessing. Case in point.

                why did google, "believed" "in encouraging more to defect and giving confidence to the opposition"?

                Because the Syrian government was (and is) an oppressive regime? There's really no debate about that.

                for an opposition that turned out to consist, in terms of actual substance, in mainly of islamic state and al nusra front (al-qaeda 's syrian arm)?

                "Opposition" is a catchall term. Cohen obviously wasn't referring to IS or Al Nusra, and lots of people defected from Syria to escape it, rather than to join the terrorists. In fact, I don't think the app would have tracked those who did, because they didn't leave Syria and ask for asylum elsewhere.

                how far will they go conceal the illegality and guilty blood ?

                WTF are you talking about? What illegality, what blood? H

                • do continue to live in fantasy world.
                  do ignore facts and see no evil.
                  be a sheep!
                  and blood on cohen's hands are virtual ink. right!

                • you "think" any fanatsay, but we read what jared cohen actually wrote in his email about "in encouraging more to defect and giving confidence to the opposition".

                  the opposition then and now mainly consisted in islamic state and al nusra front. how do you "think" them out of the opposition?

                  since you work at google, where is the google/jared cohen app supporting opponents of saudi arabia /isreal/turkey etc? what about opponents of qatar that owns al-jazeera used to cover google's involvement ? after all the

                  • and what do you "think" make people "freak out" when they get to know that google, (with likes of jared cohen basically working in both state department and google,) was eager to please state department to achieve its illegal regime change goals in syria by "helping and encouraging an opposition" that consisted of people who go around cutting people head off ( or crucifying them hear the news today ?)and suicide bombs?

                    Your'e completely mischaracterizing the whole thing. Cohen thought it would be cool, and useful, to help visualize high-level defectors from one oppressive regime that he (for whatever reason) cared about. The state department didn't ask for it. It was probably someone's 20% project, which Google management saw no reason to oppose. ISIS wasn't in the picture yet so the "cutting people [sic] head off" opposition wasn't considered.

        • There was a time when the NSA handing the data over to China would have been a crackpot conspiracy theory and the only citations would have been some sort of circular conspiracy theorist references. But given some of the well-documented behavior of our three-letter agencies, this is a suspicion that a rational person can hold. That's what's troubling here.

          • There was a time when the NSA handing the data over to China would have been a crackpot conspiracy theory and the only citations would have been some sort of circular conspiracy theorist references. But given some of the well-documented behavior of our three-letter agencies, this is a suspicion that a rational person can hold. That's what's troubling here.

            Absolutely. What I'm questioning is the assertion that Google hands the data over. Google has consistently maintained that they only provide information in response to proper legal processes and only after careful review to determine that the response is required by law.

            • I see what you mean and have to concede that you are most likely right. The data is how Google makes their money so they are likely only to hand it over when pried from their (cold, dead) fingers!

              • I see what you mean and have to concede that you are most likely right. The data is how Google makes their money so they are likely only to hand it over when pried from their (cold, dead) fingers!

                Plus it would just be a bad idea. Bad for customer relations and bad for the world -- which is actually something that the people involved at Google think about quite a bit.

    • They will be forced to watch Edward Scissorhands 100 times.
  • Edward Scissorhands has exactly nothing to to with this other than having a run time length of 105 minutes. I find their use of this as a perfect analogy to the Library of Congress, only in a matter that some will actually comprehend. One of the best headlines I've seen on Slashdot as of late.
  • I hope it goes down for at least 142 minutes. They can then see "The Shawshank Redemption". But back to my point, I did not see any search that revealed movies by run time. Interesting...

  • Is it really that easy to block? I would like to hear more about successes in circumvention, and prevention of future obstructions.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kinko ( 82040 )

      Is it really that easy to block? I would like to hear more about successes in circumvention, and prevention of future obstructions.

      When I was in China for several months, most popular Western websites were blocked - social networking sites because people can organise/talk freely, and news websites for obvious reasons.

      However different ISPs (or different regional divisions of the same large national ISP) would block different sites at different times, so it's not like all of China's traffic goes through 1 single firewalling router :). Presumably they have independent implementations of a vague set of rules. Many sites are blocked via DN

  • for some reason I read as edward "snowden"-hands

  • Having lived in China, it's somewhat pointless, if not frustrating, to have a search engine return results but upon clicking on the link you get a site inaccessible message. Depending on the status of crackdowns, whoever wants access to Google search in China can use a VPN and see the pages from the search as well.

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