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GUARDIAN Wed, 24 Feb 2010 09:55:41 GMT
Three Google executives receive suspended sentences for privacy violations after failing to take down video quickly enough
Three Google executives were convicted on privacy charges in Italy today for allowing a video of an autistic boy being abused to remain online.
Vivi Down, an advocacy group for people with Down's syndrome, alerted prosecutors to the footage uploaded to Google Video in 2006, showing a student in Turin being beaten and insulted at school.
Google Italy, which is based in Milan, eventually took down the video. None of the executives were involved in the production or uploading of the video, but prosecutors argued that as it had topped a most-viewed list it should have been noticed sooner.
David Drummond, Google's senior vice-president and chief legal officer, George Reyes, the former chief financial officer, and Peter Fleischer, the US firm's global privacy counsel, each received a six-month suspended sentence. Arvind Desikan, a senior product marketing manager, was acquitted, and all four were absolved of defamation charges.
Google had said it considered the trial a threat to internet freedom because it could set content platforms an impossible task: pre-screening the thousands of hours of footage uploaded every day to sites such as YouTube, which Google owns.
Prosecutors insisted the case was not about censorship but about balancing freedom of expression with the rights of an individual.
Using the footage and with the co-operation of Google, police were able to identify the four bullies in the video, who were sentenced to community service by a juvenile court.
Google
Privacy and the net
Internet
Italy
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GUARDIAN Tue, 16 Feb 2010 13:42:05 GMT
World-famous route spans six days in real time with tour guides, geo-tagged satellite views and choice of background noise
It is the world's most famous train journey, beginning in Moscow and ending in the dingy Pacific port of Vladivostok. Along the way are Russia's most picturesque vistas: Siberian rivers, the elegantly curving Lake Baikal, and the hazy Barguzin mountains. There is also a lot of steppe.
But for those who always dreamed of travelling on the epic Trans-Siberian railway, but who never quite managed to stir from the sofa, help is at hand: a new website that takes you on a virtual tour of the entire 5,752-mile long route.
The multi-platform portal by Google Russia and Russian railways allows you to watch the view in real time as it unfolds from the train's window. Simultaneously you can plot the Express's virtual progress eastwards on a Google map, looking at the satellite view or tracking the actual terrain and mountains.
The video footage covers the whole six-day journey. You can choose different sounds to accompany it: the rumble of wheels, sugary Russian pop tunes, or the evocative playing of a balalaika. Alternatively, you can listen to readings of Russian classics (in Russian) of Leo Tolstoy's 1,400-page War and Peace or Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls.
"We wanted to show the beauty of our country. The Trans-Siberian railway is Russia's unique calling card. The idea was to bring the journey to people who may have thought about doing the trip but who never got round to booking it," Alla Zabrovskaya, spokeswoman for Google Russia, told the Guardian today.
Asked what her favourite view was, she said: "Baikal. It made a big impression on me. It was a beautiful day when the video was shot with brilliant sun and blue sky.
"Looking at the landscape is a very good way of relaxing," she said.
The website, which launched on 11 February, had received "an avalanche" of positive reviews from all over the world via Twitter, she said.
Train nuts can watch all 150 hours of the epic journey, which starts off in Moscow, trundles past suburban orange tower blocks, and goes on through 12 Russian regions and 87 cities. For virtual travellers, of course, there is no need to queue for the loo or shower, and no danger of sharing a cabin with an omnipresent snorer. (The downside is that you don't get the scalding black tea served in a silver-leaf glass holder.)
Alternatively, you can hop on and off — skipping to the highlights and diving into Russia's rarely visited far east. The website also offers a virtual blonde tour guide, DJ Yelena Abitayeva, who gives a three-minute tour of key Russian cities if you click on a red TV icon.
She starts off in Moscow and ends up in Russky Island, one of the furthermost points of Russia's sprawling empire.
In Ulan-Ude — six time-zones from Moscow, and close to the Mongolian border — Yelena shows off a giant statue of Lenin's head. She visits a Buddhist temple and spins some prayer wheels. In the background a cow can be seen wandering languidly across the road as a Lada drives past.
Filming took place in August 2009, during Russia's scorching summer, and was a major logistical feat. Two video crews were involved, shooting out of the window as the train rattled across half of Europe and most of Asia. Instead of the usual six days to reach Vladivostok, the camera team took 30 days, filming only in daylight and staying overnight in towns along the way.
"This project is very special. We want to demonstrate how unusual and fascinating Russia really is and how much it can offer to a devoted tourist. I know few people who travelled along the Trans-Siberian railroad but I am sure that a lot of people feel enthusiastic about this trip. That's why we hope that this project will become the starting point not only for the virtual but for real trips across Russia," Konstantin Kuzmin, marketing director, Google Russia said.
The project isn't entirely without its flaws. The Moscow Times noted......
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GUARDIAN Thu, 11 Feb 2010 02:01:22 GMT
Less than a year after he was parachuted in to run MySpace, Owen Van Natta is out of a job as the ailing social network tries once again to revitalise itself.
Van Natta, who spent several years as a senior executive at Facebook, was brought in by News Corporation last April to replace ousted MySpace founder Chris DeWolfe.
But in a surprise move late on Wednesday, the company said that Van Natta himself was being replaced by two other executives brought in alongside him, Mike Jones and Jason Hirschorn. The duo are now MySpace's co-presidents, reporting to News Corp's digital chief, Jon Miller.
Miller, himself a former chief executive of AOL, was hired by Rupert Murdoch to reorganise the mogul's internet businesses. In a statement, he said that Van Natta's contribution had been an important one.
"Owen took on an incredible challenge in working to refocus and revitalise MySpace, and the business has shown very positive signs recently as a result of his dedicated work," he said.
"However, in talking to Owen about his priorities both personally and professionally going forward, we both agreed that it was best for him to step down at this time. I want to thank Owen for all of his efforts."
Once seen as a darling of the dotcom world, and bought by Murdoch in 2005 for $580m, MySpace has struggled in recent years to match the explosive growth of Facebook.
Since the shakeup which brought Van Natta on board, the company has undergone drastic reorganisation as News Corp's digital businesses have come under increasing pressure to reap more financial benefits for their parent company.
Despite redesigning and relaunching the site, however, things have remained problematic at the Los Angeles-based company.
Last year MySpace cut 30% of its US workforce and then slashed its global operations by two-thirds.
"MySpace is an incredibly unique place and we're made real gains," said Van Natta in a statement. "I'm proud of the work we've all accomplished together and look forward to watching its continued growth."
MySpace
Social networking
Facebook
Rupert Murdoch
Internet
Technology sector
United States
Bobbie Johnson
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GUARDIAN Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:05:44 GMT
In the past year, the proportion of traffic to US news sites from Facebook has tripled while that of Google News stayed static
More people are coming to US news sites via Facebook and other social networking sites such as Twitter – supplanting Google News, which had been one of the primary sources of readers, according to research by the metrics company Hitwise.
During the past year, the proportion of traffic that Facebook sends to US media sites has tripled from around 1.2% to 3.52%, while that sent by Google News has remained roughly static, at around 1.4%, says Heather Hopkins, North America analyst for Hitwise.
The growing power of Facebook also means that publishers which want to demand money from – or alternatively to lock out – Google News because of claims that it "leeches" on their content could do so without fearing a dramatic impact on their reader figures.
With more than 400m users, Facebook forms the newest – and most unexpected – threat to Google, say some analysts. Last weekend the search engine spent $5m on a TV advert during the Superbowl, puzzling many who do not see a threat from rival search engines such as Microsoft's Bing, which has less than half of its proportion of search queries.
But Hopkins notes in a blogpost for Hitwise that: "Facebook could be a major disruptor to the News and Media category. And with the Wall Street Journal already publishing content to Facebook, perhaps the social network can avoid the run-ins that Google has suffered recently with Rupert Murdoch. We will continue to watch this space."
Murdoch's editors and executives have repeatedly criticised aggregators such Google News, claiming it is leeching off their content by displaying snippets of their work. In the UK, the Murdoch-owned titles have gone as far as blocking access to their sites by Newsnow, a smaller news aggregator.
Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, has argued that publishers should take advantage of the traffic that it sends them – pointing out that it sends about 4bn such links per year.
But Facebook provides the perfect counterweight, where publishers can choose how much of their content they display and view how well it is followed. Sites such as Facebook and increasingly Twitter contribute hundreds of thousands of visits every month to UK sites, according to analysis by the Guardian.
John Minnihan, the founder of the software code respository Freepository, warns that Facebook poses one of the biggest threats to Google on the web. "With recent data showing a large uptick in 'Facebook as home page', [Google] may well indeed need to remind emerging generation who/what it is. In that case, the [Superbowl] ad makes some business sense. Whatever the real reason, it has nothing to do with 'sharing video more widely'. If FB dev'ed an integrated web-wide search engine, think about how much traffic would evaporate [from Google] overnite. That's nightmare stuff."
Tellingly, Minnihan's comments were made on Twitter — which Google is rumoured to be trying to compete with in a "social version" of its Gmail webmail product to be launched today. Google has already tried – and failed – to create a world-scale social network with its Orkut product, but been obliged instead to purchase access to Twitter's search results to provide real-time insight into what people are talking about. Facebook's content however lies beyond its reach – and that could be crucial in the forthcoming months as news publishers in the US and UK consider putting up higher paywalls or demanding money from aggregators.
Facebook
Google
Search engines
Internet
Social networking
Charles Arthur
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GUARDIAN Wed, 03 Feb 2010 13:30:01 GMT
Google has finally joined the ranks of technology companies that invest in university research, and its first $5.7m in Google Focused Research Awards will benefit the University of Cambridge Computer Lab, among others
Google has announced its first serious funding for university research, with $5.7m going to 12 projects led by 31 professors at 10 universities. Only one of these is outside the US: the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory will get some funds for its Computing for the Future of the Planet research, led by Professor Andy Hopper. Cambridge isn't saying how much it will get ("a six figure sum"), but grants range between $100,000 and $1.5m.
Google is supporting four areas that it says "are of key interest to Google as well as the research community". Half the awards are concerned with energy efficiency in computing -- one of Goole's primary interests -- with the other areas being machine learning, the use of mobile phones as data collection devices for public health and environment monitoring, and privacy.
Professor Hopper, whose research comes in the privacy category, says the awards "place no restrictions or constraints on the funded research". However, privacy will be increasingly important to Google as it gets access to ever-larger amounts of personal data.
No doubt there will also be spin-off benefits for Google as it increases its contact with bright students -- potential employees -- and introduces them to Google technologies.
There's a long tradition of technology companies funding university research, particularly in the US, so it's good to see Google joining in.
The Cambridge Computer Lab is based in the William Gates Building, which received "a substantial donation" from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It's next door to Microsoft Research Cambridge.
Google
Jack Schofield
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GUARDIAN Wed, 20 Jan 2010 13:34:16 GMT
A longer-than-usual Twitter outage has prompted speculation about the causes – is Bill Gates to blame?
Twitter has been down this morning, which always gets addicts asking themselves two important questions: Whose fault is it? and How long does Twitter have to be down before it prompts a blogpost? (People smarter than me probably have a pre-written story so they can blog it before Twitter comes back up.)
The latest extended outage cast suspicion on Twitter newbie Bill Gates, characterised in last night's blog post as pulling in users like a black hole. But that seems a little unlikely, if only because the idea has been punted by the Daily Telegraph.
Twitter survived the arrival of Oprah, tweeting live on her TV show, and no Seattle nerd – not even Seattle's richest nerd – has Oprah's mass-market pulling power. (See my graph.)
Another theory was suggested in comments to TechCrunch's Twitter-is-down story, and posted by John Carnell at TechnicaVita. He wrote:
The last big event around 1 minute before the site failed was that an aftershock in Haiti measuring 6.1 had just struck. I think we might have just seen Twitter overloaded as that single fact was retweeted across the network.
Meanwhile, Twitter itself resorted to blaming innocent marine life*, as usual. Its status update said, simply:
We are experiencing an outage due to an extremely high number of whales. Our on-call team is working on a fix.
Will we ever know the answer? If so, will anyone care?
The problem is that when Twitter is down, there's not much for some folk to do except write Twitter-is-down blog posts. However, Twitter being down means that there's no way to tweet those Twitter-is-down blog posts, and thus reach the only audience that gives a hoot. Not you, obv.
* See The Story of the Fail Whale at ReadWriteWeb
Bill Gates
Twitter
Jack Schofield
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GUARDIAN Mon, 18 Jan 2010 11:44:25 GMT
If web rumours are correct, the NYT is about to announce a Financial Times-style paywall by metering its online readers
The New York Times is said to be close to announcing that it will adopt the Financial Times's system of metered access, under which users are allowed to see a few pieces of content free each month and then asked to subscribe. The debate inside the paper seems settled, at least according to New York magazine's Daily Intel blog, which says that the company's chairman, Arthur Sulzberger Jr, will be announced within weeks.
There is speculation that the decision will be announced at the same time as a content partnership for the new Apple tablet computer, which is expected to launch on 27 January. Several magazines have already unveiled digital editions tailored for tablet viewing, but no prominent newspaper has yet followed suit.
The advantage attributed to a metered model is that it would allow NYTimes.com to extract money from heavy users while preserving its impressive reach: it had 16 million monthly unique users in Nielsen Online's November figures, enough to rank it fifth – guardian.co.uk, by way of comparison, had 5.4 million users on the same measure.
Denise Warren, the general manager of NYTimes.com, has said before: "If we move in this direction, we want to make sure that we're not dipping into the advertising bucket to get money out of the subscriber bucket."
The paywall debate started in August last year, when Rupert Murdoch decided to move News Corp's newspaper sites behind a paywall beginning with the relaunch of the Times website in spring.
The New York Times has some experience with paywalls. In 2005 it brought in a subscription system called TimesSelect, which asked readers to pay $7.95 a month or $49.95 a year for the paper's opinion columns and web-only writing from big-name writers. It gathered about 227,000 subscribers, from a monthly unique user base then measured at 13 million. But the company brought the project to an end in September 2007, believing that it could make more money with the online advertising revenue from a larger audience.
But with the recession forcing cuts in the NYT newsroom, and Rupert Murdoch advocating paywalls in public, the idea came back to life.
The internal debate has gone on for months now, balancing the risk of losing traffic – and with it advertising – against the fear that advertising alone will never pay for a journalistic operation on the scale of the New York Times.
Advertising decline during the recession has certainly made the idea of a paywall more attractive.
The decision will have immense effect on the strategic positioning of the New York Times – and could rearrange the pecking order of English-language news organisations on the internet.
"The Times could have fought to become the preeminent news brand on earth, fighting it out with the BBC for that title. Instead, I fear, it will duck into its shell as the Washington Post has," said the American web evangelist and MediaGuardian columnist Jeff Jarvis.
The New York Times declined to comment, saying it will announce its decision when it is ready.
New York Times
Charging for content
US press and publishing
Digital media
Newspapers
Newspapers & magazines
Mercedes Bunz
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GUARDIAN Thu, 14 Jan 2010 13:04:31 GMT
The creep of internet censorship in China: a timeline of the last 12 months
January
China launches a crackdown on "vulgar" websites including Google that it says have failed to censor inappropriate content.
As the drive intensifies, observers warn it is affecting politically sensitive content too.
Later in the month, Chinese media censors the inauguration speech of the US president, Barack Obama: state TV cuts away from the live feed after a reference to communism and leading websites remove the word from translated texts.March
China blocks YouTube after denouncing as "a lie" footage appearing to show security forces beating Tibetans in Lhasa last year.June
China blocks Twitter, Flickr and Hotmail days ahead of the 20th anniversary on the bloody military crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square.
Later in the month it blocks Google services, with search functions and Gmail inaccessible for over an hour.
The biggest news of all is the massive outcry as the government orders PC makers to install its controversial censorship software, Green Dam.
Following complaints from internet users, businesses and foreign governments the authorities back down, saying it will not be compulsory.July
Internet access is cut across the entire north-western region, home to more than 19 million people, after deadly ethnic riots in its capital.
Some sites are later restored but as of January 2010 access remains extremely restricted.
Facebook reports access problems and remains inaccessible from China as of January 2010.
Later in the month the government says it plans to implement a five-year programme advocating clean online games, starting in 2010. It bans websites featuring or publicising online games that "glamorise mafia gangs".August
The government drops its plan to install the controversial Green Dam software on every new computer sold in China, despite official comments the previous month that it would go ahead after all.September
It emerges that news websites in China have begun requiring new users to register their true identities before allowing them to post comments.November
Obama criticises internet controls during his visit to China, describing himself as "a big supporter of non-censorship".December
The government says its campaign against pornography on the web and through mobile Wap sites will continue until May 2010.
It later emerges China has issued new internet regulations, including what some interpret as an attempt to create a "whitelist" of approved websites that could potentially place much of the internet off-limits to Chinese readers, and ordering domain management institutions and internet service providers to tighten controls over domain name registration.
At the end of the month police say the crackdown on internet porn has brought 5,394 arrests and 4,186 criminal case investigations during 2009.
China
Censorship
Internet
Google
Tania Branigan
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GUARDIAN Thu, 14 Jan 2010 07:41:03 GMT
• China says it opposes hacking and has suffered cyber attacks
• Google feared dissidents were at risk from surveillance
Google moved quickly to announce that it would stop censoring its Chinese service after realising dissidents were at risk from attempts to use the company's technology for political surveillance, according to a source with direct knowledge of the internet giant's most senior management.
China this morning issued a statement saying it resolutely opposed hacking and was itself a victim of cyber-attacks, in its first response to Google's hacking claims. In a statement posted on the state council information office website, cabinet spokesman Wang Chen reminded companies of their need to abide by internet controls, citing their "social responsibilities". The remarks did not mention Google directly. The source told the Guardian the company's decision was largely influenced by the experiences of Sergey Brin's Russian refugee background.
The Google co-founder "felt this very personally", the source said.
"The notion that somebody would try to turn Google's tools into tools of political surveillance was something he found deeply offensive."
When it became clear that the cyber attacks were about political surveillance, people at the very top of the company "decided they no longer wanted to participate in this kind of behaviour," said the source.
"It was felt that whether it's censorship or whether it's surveillance or threats to people who speak out this is all about suppression of free speech and was something the company no longer felt in conscience they could stand by that."
The US government intervened in the confrontation yesterday, urging Beijing to answer Google's claim of a massive hacking attack. Chinese authorities initially responded cautiously to Google's announcement. In the government's first public remarks, an official said it was "seeking more information". The unnamed official from China's state council information office – the cabinet spokesman's office – added: "It is still hard to say whether Google will quit China or not. Nobody knows."
It is thought that as many as 20 other companies including internet and mobile phone businesses were also being attacked in order to carry out political surveillance, or industrial espionage, according to the source. Google acknowledged that it might have to withdraw from China.
The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said: "We have been briefed by Google on these allegations, which raise very serious concerns and questions. We look to the Chinese government for an explanation. The ability to operate with confidence in cyberspace is critical in a modern society and economy."
Google is understood to want to try to work with Beijing, according to the senior company source, who added it was "hopeful that they can accept that this is a new century, it's a new time. I don't think it's the Chinese government as a whole … but I think there are some left over elements of totalitarianism in China, be it in government or be it in hackers or what not. But those elements – it's time for them to go. It's time the Chinese people had unfettered access to information."
In a CNBC interview, David Drummond, senior vice-president of corporate development, chief legal officer, and author of the Google announcement, said: "We are not saying one way or the other whether the attacks are state-sponsored or done with any approval of the state.
"We do know that it was very organised and the attack came from China and political dissidents and people interested in human rights in China were clearly targeted."
Google spoke to the Chinese government yesterday but has not disclosed what form the contact took or who was involved.
"We have talked to the Chinese authorities and we will be talking to them more in the coming days," it said.
The Google source said the company decided to move quickly once it realised what was happening because they felt "a moral obligation to....
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GUARDIAN Thu, 14 Jan 2010 07:05:00 GMT
MI5 and US intelligence warned their top firms long ago about China's 'government-backed hacking'
Just over two years ago the head of MI5, Jonathan Evans, wrote to about 300 British firms warning them to be wary of Chinese hackers trying to monitor their systems or break into them remotely via the internet: Rolls-Royce, the jet engine maker, and Royal Dutch Shell had both fallen victim to computer intrusions. It was only part of an ongoing strategy of "information warfare" that China's government – through its People's Liberation Army (PLA) – is carrying out across the world.
The latest targets in a scheme appear to be companies in Silicon Valley, where companies including Google and Adobe, which makes hugely popular Flash software (used for the vast majority of video online, such as the BBC's iPlayer and YouTube), have discovered intrusions into the computers where they store their "source code" – the millions of lines of programming, readable by humans, that comprise their software. Those are, effectively, their crown jewels: if they fall into rivals' hands, the programs can be copied, altered, or produced for free under another name.
For America's hi-tech firms, the idea that their source code falls into Chinese hands is the worst nightmare: intellectual property protection is notoriously poor in China, and the code could be rewritten into a piece of Chinese software – or even sold on the world market to compete with the original.
What makes it most worrying is that the hackers have the sanction of Beijing (though it always denies any link). A briefing paper produced in October by the US military security firm Northrop Grumman for the US-China Economic and Security Commission looked in detail at Beijing's strategy, including a roundup of hacking from China over the past 10 years.
Its summary was bleak, predicting a world of "information warfare" via the internet, using a strategy it dubbed "integrated network electronic warfare": "The PLA is training and equipping its force to use a variety of [internet warfare] tools for intelligence gathering and to establish information dominance over its adversaries during a conflict. PLA campaign doctrine identifies the early establishment of information dominance over an enemy as one of the highest operational priorities in a conflict; Inew appears designed to support this objective."
Such warfare is carried out by expert hackers with a range of skills: some will know how to hack into web servers, while others are skilled at finding previously undiscovered weaknesses – known as "zero-day vulnerabilities" – in commercial software. Standard antivirus and warning systems simply won't detect their use, meaning that computers can be compromised without warning.
Northrop Grumman did not think it was lone hackers with a grudge against the west, either: "The depth of resources necessary to sustain the scope of computer network exploitation targeting the US and many countries around the world coupled with the extremely focused targeting of defence engineering data, US military operational information, and China-related policy information is beyond the capabilities or profile of virtually all organised cybercriminal enterprises and is difficult at best without some type of state sponsorship."
In other words: though China might deny it, Beijing is behind the intrusions – such as Titan Rain, the name the Pentagon has given to a series of attacks since 2003 on groups such as Lockheed Martin, Nasa and the Sandia National Laboratories. Or the attempts to "phish" members of the UK parliament in autumn 2005.
What makes it obvious that these are state-sponsored attacks, as Northrop Grumman notes, is that the information being targeted is not credit card or bank account details but engineering, source code, and detail about military preparedness and networks.
According to the US Air Force, by 2007 the Chinese had "exfiltrated" (copied back to their own computers) at least 10 to 20........
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GUARDIAN Thu, 14 Jan 2010 01:17:38 GMT
From a crackdown on "vulgarity" to a white list of approved websites
January: China launches a crackdown on vulgar websites that have failed to censor inappropriate content including Google. As the drive intensifies, observers warn it is affecting politically sensitive content too. Later that month, Chinese the media censors US president Barack Obama's inauguration speech: state TV cuts away from live feed after a reference to communism and leading websites remove word from translated text.
March: China blocks YouTube after denouncing as "a lie" footage that appears to show security forces beating Tibetans in Lhasa last year.
June: China blocks Twitter, Flickr and Hotmail days ahead of the 20th anniversary of the bloody military crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square.
Later that month it blocks Google's services, with search functions and Gmail inaccessible for more than an hour.
The biggest news of all is the outcry as the government orders PC makers to install its censorship software, Green Dam.
But following complaints from internet users, businesses and foreign governments, the authorities back down, saying they will not be compulsory
July: Internet access is cut across north-west China, home to more than 19 million people, after deadly ethnic riots in its capital, Urumqi
Some sites are later restored, but as of January 2010 access remains restricted. Facebook reports access problems and will remain inaccessible from China as of January 2010.
Later that month the government says it plans to implement a five-year program advocating clean online games, starting in 2010.
It also bans websites that feature or publicise online games that "glamorise mafia gangs"
August: The government drops its plan to install the Green Dam software on every new computer sold in China, despite official comments the previous month that it would go ahead after all
September: News websites in China are requiring new users to register their true identities before allowing them to post comments, it emerges.
November: Obama criticises internet controls during his visit to China, describing himself as "a big supporter of non-censorship".
December: The government says its campaign against pornography on the web and through mobile WAP sites will continue until May 2010, state news agency Xinhua reported. It later emerges China has issued new internet regulations, including what some interpret as an attempt to create a "white list" of approved websites that could potentially place much of the internet off limits to Chinese readers and ordering domain management institutions and internet service providers to tighten control over domain name registration.
At the end of the month, police say the crackdown on internet porn has brought 5,394 arrests and 4,186 criminal case investigations in 2009.
China
Internet
Censorship
Google
Barack Obama
Tania Branigan
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GUARDIAN Thu, 14 Jan 2010 00:30:00 GMT
Free speech advocates see turning point in corporate America's relations with China
Google's decision to reverse its censorship of search engine results in China received a warm welcome in Silicon Valley last night.
Human rights campaigners, freedom of speech advocates and dotcom entrepreneurs all applauded the Californian company's decision to stop cooperating with the Chinese government.
The move, which threatens to end the internet giant's business in China after four troubled years, was seen by many as a turning point in the relationship between corporate America and Beijing.
Jonathan Zittrain, professor of internet law at Harvard and a prominent anti-censorship activist, said he thought Google could wield significant influence in a fight to bring more uncensored information to Chinese citizens.
"In a world in which we are so used to public relations massaging of messages, this stands out as a direct declaration. It's amazing," he said. "I think the Chinese are going to say, 'bye-bye Google' – but just think about what happens if Google's engineers set about making information as accessible as possible in China."
Others agreed the company was beginning what could be a wider shift in attitudes.
John Battelle, a former managing editor of Wired magazine who covered the rise of Google in his 2005 book The Search, said others could follow.
"In this case, Google is again taking a leadership role, and the company is forcing China's hand," he wrote on his blog.
"This is politics at its finest, and it's a very clear statement to China: we're done playing the game your way."
While many threw their support behind Google's decision to stop censoring its search index, others – particularly those with significant business interests in China – were more circumspect.
Most of the company's major rivals – including Microsoft – refused to comment on Google's announcement, while Yahoo released a terse statement in which it denounced the hacking attacks that Google said had prompted the decision.
"Yahoo is committed to protecting human rights, privacy and security," said the company.
"We condemn any attempts to infiltrate company networks to obtain user information. We stand aligned with Google that these kinds of attacks are deeply disturbing and strongly believe that the violation of user privacy is something that we as internet pioneers must all oppose."
Microsoft and Yahoo have been criticised in the past for their activities in China, which have included removing websites belonging to dissidents, and the handing over of information which led to the jailing of several outspoken critics of the government.
In 2007, a congressional inquiry criticised Yahoo's complicity in the imprisonment of Chinese journalist Shi Tao, leading to claims that Yahoo's co-founder Jerry Yang – who was born in Taiwan – had acted as a "moral pygmy" by bowing to pressure from Beijing.
But while some leading technology companies have colluded with the Chinese government to silence its political opponents, others have been even more intimately involved in attempts to disrupt and silence dissidents.
At the same time that Google was announcing its decision to lift the ban on certain words and phrases, Cisco Systems – which was instrumental in building the systems used in the Great Firewall of China – announced plans to increase investment in its businesses in the country.
Sarah Lacy, author of the book Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley, and writer for the influential Silicon Valley blog Techcrunch, said Google's decision was a pragmatic example of dotcom realpolitik, pointing out that Google's business was not doing well in China.
"They're taking a bad situation and making something good out of it, both from a human and business point of view," she wrote.
"I'm not saying human rights didn't play into the decision, but this was as much about business."
Google
China
Censorship
Search........
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GUARDIAN Wed, 13 Jan 2010 14:02:46 GMT
Beijing yet to respond to search engine's move apparently prompted by hacking of human rights activists' Gmail accounts
Google has thrown down the gauntlet to China by saying it is no longer willing to censor search results on its Chinese service.
The world's leading search engine said the decision followed a cyber-attack that it believes was aimed at gathering information on Chinese human rights activists. It also cited a clampdown on the internet in China over the past year. Its statement raised the prospect of closing Google.cn and potentially its offices in China.
The Chinese government issued its first, cautious response several hours after the announcement, saying it was "seeking more information". In a statement published via the state news agency Xinhua, an unnamed official from China's state council information office ‑ the cabinet spokesman's office ‑ added: "It is still hard to say whether Google will quit China or not. Nobody knows."
The two sides spoke . Google confirmed: "We have talked to the Chinese authorities and we will be talking to them more in the coming days."
Google acknowledged that its decision to stop self-censoring "may well mean" the closure of Google.cn and its offices in China. That is an understatement, given that to launch Google.cn it had to agree to censor sensitive material, such as details of human rights groups and references to the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
The US government upped the stakes when it stepped into the row, with the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, urging the Chinese to respond to Google's hacking claims.
Google was in contact with the US state department ahead of its announcement. Department spokesman PJ Crowley said: "Every nation has an obligation, regardless of the origin of malicious cyber-activities, to keep its part of the network secure. That includes China. Every nation should criminalise malicious activities on computer networks."
In a post on the official Google Blog, the company outlined a "highly sophisticated and targeted" attack in December which it believes affected at least 20 other companies: "These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered, combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web, have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China.
"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."
Human Rights Watch praised the decision and urged other firms to follow suit in challenging censorship. "A transnational attack on privacy is chilling, and Google's response sets a great example," said Arvind Ganesan, director of the group's corporations and human rights programme.
In China, some websites carried accounts of Google's decision, although they did not mention the cyber-attacks. News portals were reportedly told to downgrade the issue, although the Guardian saw articles on major sites including Sina.com. But while many seemed to welcome the firm's decision ‑ some left flowers at the entrance to its Beijing headquarters ‑ others attacked it.
One poster, Weiwoguyan, wrote: "Since you are in China you need to obey Chinese law … Do not use it to threaten China."
A prominent liberal blogger, Ran Yunfei, wrote on his blog: "Google leaving China is definitely not good news." Comparing the decision to dissidents who choose to emigrate, he added: "Those are obedient citizens and [their choice] is satisfactory to the authorities."
Google claimed the cyber-attack originated from China and that its intellectual property was stolen, but that evidence suggested a primary goal was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.
Its inquiry had shown that, separately, the Gmail accounts of dozens of human.......
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GUARDIAN Wed, 13 Jan 2010 11:44:13 GMT
For the Chinese regime, self-censorship by firms such as Google is frequently more reliable than the official 'Great Firewall'
Google does not like to talk openly about the technology behind its censored Chinese search engine, but plenty is known about how the internet giant has filtered material for the past four years.
The basic system that the company uses to build its google.cn website is exactly the same as elsewhere in the world: a piece of software – known as a spider – that travels around the web, reading the pages it finds and putting them into a sprawling search index.
In most countries, the spider simply collects everything it finds online and files it away in Google's vast library. But for its Chinese site, Google has very specific rules about which pages and websites it keeps in the index, and which it leaves out.
The local government keeps a list of words and phrases that it has banned from local search engines, such as human rights, genocide and 4 June (the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre). The Communist party also blocks a number of swear words and sexual phrases that it believes to be "vulgar" or "harmful".
But in addition to the basic list of banned terms provided by the country's internet censor – which is called the China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Centre (CIIRC) – Google also employs two other methods to screen out information likely to be deemed dangerous by the government in Beijing.
First, Google can block entire websites known to carry so-called offensive content. This allows blanket bans of large sites, particularly news websites, which may carry stories and pages that trouble officials. A basic search for any content carried on the BBC, for example, is highly unlikely to turn up any results.
Secondly, the company will remove specific web addresses – single pages within a larger site – that are known to carry dangerous content. This method is used to effectively erase information from websites whose complete absence would leave a gaping hole, leaving users the impression of a fully functioning website that just has a few missing pieces.
Google is far from being the only company that has worked under with self-censorship inside China. As well as homegrown companies, who must comply or be run out of business, foreign corporations such as Microsoft and Yahoo have acted to censor themselves. With the threat of intervention looming over the heads of those who fail to successfully filter out dangerous information, companies often act extremely conservatively – removing more than officials have demanded – to avoid any chance of offending the CIIRC.
The benefits of this panopticon system for the Chinese government are clear, particularly since self-censorship is often even more pernicious and successful than its own attempts to filter the web.
The Chinese government's own "Great Firewall" – part of the Golden Shield Project first mooted in the late 1990s – is in many respects a hit-and-miss technology. Its application is often uneven and regionalised: users in some parts of the country will find certain websites and keywords blocked, while others elsewhere may be able to access the same information without problem.
But when self-censorship takes place, as it has with Google since 2006, there is no difference, no fault lines and no variations, because the questionable information simply never goes into the record.
The overall result means that whereas a Chinese visitor to google.com may find that certain pages or results simply do not load when clicked, anyone using google.cn will see a different set of sanitised answers (Google.com links to a Wikipedia page about the protests; Google.cn links to an inoffensive page that says the rumoured riots "did not happen").
So while a search of Google.com produces a broken facsimile of the internet, anyone searching Google's Chinese website for information about the Tiananmen Square massacre would never know that pages had been........
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GUARDIAN Wed, 13 Jan 2010 10:31:00 GMT
China's bloggers support Google's decision to challenge censors but some criticise its tactics
Chinese bulletin boards and microblogs have been buzzing all day with chatter about Google's announcement. The vast majority either supported Google's decision to challenge the censors or expressed regret at the possible loss of a cherished search engine, but there was also criticism of the US firm's business tactics.
Here is a translation of selected posts on the Sina microblog, which is inside the Great Fire Wall:
"Just heard Google may quit China. I couldn't believe it. Google has become a trusted friend. Whenever I've got a question I refer to it. You might say I grew up with Google. I hope this unexpected news is not true. If Google really gives up on the Chinese market, it will be a big loss for Chinese netizens." Celilia Jing.
"Google quitting China is a case of survival of the fittest. If you can't hack it, then you are knocked out. Baidu must be laughing secretly. Although they have also just been attacked by hackers, they can now have a bigger share of the cake because Google is gone." Liangjian99.
"Do Chinese people really need Google so much? It's only a symbol. Don't be so stupid and arouse the public feeling." Da Jiang
"Google can't leave China! Since last year, I have been using so many of its products for work. How can it leave? I feel sad, but I am practical. I will try to find alternative software so that I don't need to climb over the firewall to use the English version." yaolaner.
"China is a country governed by the rule of law. As long as you are in China you must obey Chinese law and be supervised by the government. Do not threaten China. I think that is the bottom line and if they cannot manage that, then I won't use Google in the future. weiwoguyan.
On the Twittersphere, which is available in China only to those who are willing and able to get around the Great Fire Wall, Google was widely applauded, though there was some cynicism about its business motives.
"Technology genius, you can never use your talent in a big intranet monitored by bureaucrats. You can only do nothing or do evil. Please go abroad, for the sake of China's future!" @mranti.
"Compared with Yahoo's past behaviour, such as [former Yahoo boss] Yang Zhiyuan handing over dissidents' email details, Google statement is very manly. How can anyone not love Google!" @newsinchina
Google
China
Internet
Censorship
Privacy & the media
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Jonathan Watts
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