Google Needs to Come Clean About Its Chinese Plans
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Re: Google Needs to Come Clean About Its Chinese Plans
#2Fact 1: Google only pulled search business out of China. adsense/adwords/maps works fine in China
Fact 2: Search engines are more and more irrelevant these days. All interesting new content are either from Weibo or Wechat (or other closed garden)
Fact 3: all reports about "Google returning to China" are based solely on the "Intercept report"[1] as source. I suggest everyone take a look at it. I think there's a huge misunderstanding. Maybe it's in-app search for some domain business only instead of web-wide search?
Fact 4: Firewalls in China has a hierarchical layers of blocking. Some times the plain text http is effected, sometimes it's the DNS, sometimes it's the tis certs, most of the time it's heuristics (e.g. SVM model to classify traffic) and random. There are also collateral blocking, like a blocking a CDN. You can't guess exactly which one piece of information was the culprit. And it all varies in places and time. All "blocking" are based on empirical assumptions, no one have ever done a large scale, down to the packet level study of it. Administrative notices of taking down articles are blurry as hell. Sometimes there's even corporates faking govn't orders to remove some review as PR move. So it's very hard to suggest if an "article" should be blocked or not. The chinese govn't utilize this method to force everyone to "self-censorship" and some business are making a profit of it.
[1]: https://theintercept.com/2018/08/01/google-china-search-engi...
Re: Google Needs to Come Clean About Its Chinese Plans
#3Fact 1: Google only pulled search business out of China. adsense/adwords/maps works fine in China Fact 2: Search engines are more and more irrelevant these days. All interesting new content are either from Weibo or Wechat (or other closed garden) Fact 3: all reports about "Google returning to China" are based solely on the "Intercept report"[1] as source. I suggest everyone take a look at it. I think there's a huge m…
>Google only pulled search business out of China. adsense/adwords/maps works fine in China
That's "google search" if just by a different name
>f2
see part 1
>f3
Google returning is contradicted by p1+p2
>f4
what does that have to do with p1-3 though
Re: Google Needs to Come Clean About Its Chinese Plans
#4Fact 1: Google only pulled search business out of China. adsense/adwords/maps works fine in China Fact 2: Search engines are more and more irrelevant these days. All interesting new content are either from Weibo or Wechat (or other closed garden) Fact 3: all reports about "Google returning to China" are based solely on the "Intercept report"[1] as source. I suggest everyone take a look at it. I think there's a huge m…
Maps "works", there are essentially zero updates for many years. Walk down a street in Shanghai where business pop up/ shutdown/ move more often than annually on average, hardly a single name ever correlates with google maps.
Re: Google Needs to Come Clean About Its Chinese Plans
#5Fact 1: Google only pulled search business out of China. adsense/adwords/maps works fine in China Fact 2: Search engines are more and more irrelevant these days. All interesting new content are either from Weibo or Wechat (or other closed garden) Fact 3: all reports about "Google returning to China" are based solely on the "Intercept report"[1] as source. I suggest everyone take a look at it. I think there's a huge m…
>Google only pulled search business out of China. adsense/adwords/maps works fine in China That's "google search" if just by a different name >f2 see part 1 >f3 Google returning is contradicted by p1+p2 >f4 what does that have to do with p1-3 though
> what does that have to do with p1-3 though
FTA
> Documents seen by The Intercept, marked “Google confidential,” say that Google’s Chinese search app will automatically identify and filter websites blocked by the Great Firewall.
This part does not make much sense. It's simply impractical.
Re: Google Needs to Come Clean About Its Chinese Plans
#6Fact 1: Google only pulled search business out of China. adsense/adwords/maps works fine in China Fact 2: Search engines are more and more irrelevant these days. All interesting new content are either from Weibo or Wechat (or other closed garden) Fact 3: all reports about "Google returning to China" are based solely on the "Intercept report"[1] as source. I suggest everyone take a look at it. I think there's a huge m…
> Fact 1: Google only pulled search business out of China. adsense/adwords/maps works fine in China
YouTube and Gmail also don't work in China, which are significant. They technically didn't leave China, however, because they never entered it.
> Fact 2: Search engines are more and more irrelevant these days. All interesting new content are either from Weibo or Wechat (or other closed garden)
I think you mean to qualify that with in China?
> Fact 4: Firewalls in China has a hierarchical layers of blocking
Most of the western-world web moved to HTTPS specifically because China was inspecting plain text packets. It was interesting to watch the change over happen from 2008-2011.
Re: Google Needs to Come Clean About Its Chinese Plans
#7Fact 1: Google only pulled search business out of China. adsense/adwords/maps works fine in China Fact 2: Search engines are more and more irrelevant these days. All interesting new content are either from Weibo or Wechat (or other closed garden) Fact 3: all reports about "Google returning to China" are based solely on the "Intercept report"[1] as source. I suggest everyone take a look at it. I think there's a huge m…
Maps "works", there are essentially zero updates for many years. Walk down a street in Shanghai where business pop up/ shutdown/ move more often than annually on average, hardly a single name ever correlates with google maps.
Worth notice is that, foreign companies are forbidden to collect its own map data in China, let alone something like Street View.
Re: Google Needs to Come Clean About Its Chinese Plans
#8EFF complains about this ONLY because EFF partnered with Google https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/work-eff-summer-apply-....
You don't hear Mozilla or Apple complaining about Google returning to China though. I am not really sure why Google matters in China and how this matters to anyone. You enter someone's country and you ought to obey the local laws there. Just as Chinese companies entering U.S. need to respect U.S. laws. There is no conflict of interest. It's simply a business decision. If people really care about privacy and what not, Google wouldn't have 50,000 engineers today. It would be like 1/3 gone at least. But why so many Googlers are staying anyway? I don't have to spell the answer but I will: $$.
So let's not pretend we are not guilty of being an enabler. To come clean, one must be totally out of the whole Google business. This means Googlers should all quit - but trust me, most people won't, even though they cheer others to stand up. I am not being cynical at all, just being realistic about hypocrisy and reality.
Re: Google Needs to Come Clean About Its Chinese Plans
#9> Eight years after Google initially took a stand against Internet censorship by exiting the Chinese search market
Wried, don't just mention the censorship reason. The bigger picture is [0][1]:
1. China government demanding content deletion by "Red-Header Files" (Government document) rather than law (As it will make the censorship too apparent), and it's violated Google's policy. NOT because of Google is an anti-censorship enthusiast as many people think they are.
2. During that time, Google (including Gmail) also under attack (with possible internal help) by a group of hackers who Google claims are sponsored by the government.
Now, 8 years later, things changed a lot. Especially after the implementation of the China Internet Security Law (中华人民共和国网络安全法)[2] which makes censorship a public responsibility ...
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2010/01/12/google-china-attacks/
[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/google-pr...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Internet_Security_Law
Re: Google Needs to Come Clean About Its Chinese Plans
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maps "works", there are essentially zero updates for many years. Walk down a street in Shanghai where business pop up/ shutdown/ move more often than annually on average, hardly a single name ever correlates with google maps.
Worth notice is that, foreign companies are forbidden to collect its own map data in China, let alone something like Street View.
Individuals too, there seem to have been by Chinese standards extremely high fines issued related to OSM.