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Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation

theintercept.com

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Re: Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation

#161

Post by Despegar »

cromwellian wrote: post #83
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, every part of this story really happened because of Ryan's coverage. His reveal is what brought it to the attention of other Google employees, members of Congress, and human rights groups. And eventually, it appears key information he released is what also led to it's effective closure. It's a true testament to the power of quality investigative journalism.

You mean, it really happened because a brave Google employee leaked it. If this employee had leaked the same memo to Wikileaks, or the Washington Post, or any other mechanism of widespread dissemination would have been the same. This is like giving credit to Glenn Greenwald instead of Edward Snowden, or Reality Winner, or Chelsea Manning. The real people who take the risks end up in the back, while the reporters end…

If the whistle blowers wanted the prestige there's a way they could have done that: go on-the-record. They chose not to, perhaps fearing retaliation, which is fine. I don't see how that takes away at all from Ryan Gallagher. His stories had multiple sources so it's not like the Edward Snowden situation at all. He got the original scoop, and as far as I can tell, all the follow-up stories as well.

And it's not like the story has concluded anyway. Google's management still seems inclined to launching in China, they just want the heat to go away right now.

Re: Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation

#162

Post by ineedasername »

Title seems wrong, it sounds like Dragonfly is still undergoing active development, just with reduced data access (no more access to 265.com search data) but the article references ongoing development, even though some developers were removed. That doesn't sound like it's actually ended. And the title's quote of "Effectively Ended" seems only to be quoting itself, there's no one in the article the said those words.

Pichai's words to congress could easily be read to mean "we don't have a release date at this time" not that it wasn't still an active project.

Re: Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation

#163

Post by saulrh »

russdpale wrote: post #135
srkmno wrote: post #98

Never really understood why Google running a search engine in China is controversial, it wouldn't be the first US company doing business there, nor the first to censor due to local laws (Apple censors their app store etc) and it's not like tiananmen square queries will be the bulk of their traffic.

I don't know how old you are, but google blossomed under the guise of "do no evil", that is why its controversial.

Moral of the story: never try to be a good guy, because you'll be held to a higher standard than anyone else and crucified while your competitors, who never claimed to be anything other than malignant stains on humanity, fly under the radar and laugh. How disappointing.

Re: Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation

#164

Post by derEitel »

whatshisface wrote: post #160
anonymouzz wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps I'm taking the moral high ground here, but you should contact the media or human rights organizations, spill the beans to help them investigate. Anonymously if necessary.

Which organizations other than Wikileaks have a history of successfully pursuing this stuff?

The group's behind the Panama Papers, Cum-Ex Scandals, LuxLeaks etc.

Re: Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation

#165

Post by DenisM »

snaky wrote: post #113
whoisjuan wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How good is Yandex indexing and search technology?...My guess is that probably not even close to Google, and heavily optimized for slavic inflections and cyrilic.

Why do you think so? Yandex has 2% search market share in South Korea, that's not big but Baidu has less than 5% there, so it's comparable.

I heard that nowadays search engine quality is largely determined by traffic that's used to infer relevance from user behavior. Less traffic - less quality. Bing, for example, has decent engineers, but since Google is already ahead it will stay ahead if only just for that reason. So I was told.

So Yandex doesn't have that much hope outside of Russia. Unless a dramatic breakthrough is made, of course.

Re: Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation

#166

Post by debt »

Nasrudith wrote: post #104
iaw wrote: post #80

> Scott Beaumont, Google’s leader in China and a key architect of the Dragonfly project, “did not feel that the security, privacy, and legal teams should be able to question his product decisions,” If I was more eloquent I'd draw some analogy between Scott Beaumont's behavior and China...

Well it is clearly an authoritarian personality - don't question his decisions and just obey. Sucks to work under but isn't usually quite as bad as an authoritarian government . And really that sort of thing should be a reason to be fired instantly from a tech company - not because of employee morale, expecting people you pay to think not to think being bad management, ethics, or anything like that but just because t…

Idk probably knew they weren’t breaking any laws and also wanted to hit an aggressive deadline.

That is if any of his engineers had qualms about what they were doing they’d be checked at the door because again it’s all legal according to the law and they had to hit a deadline.

Especially because there’s nothing here that’s technically exceptional other than it runs counter to what we Americans considered ethical.

Glad the PR fallout tipped whatever cost-benefit analysis they did by severely damaging the Google brand. Crazy they didn’t consider it up front.

The fallout feels similar to them the release of the Boston Dynamics video. They don’t want to be associated with “job automating” robots.

Re: Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation

#167

Post by redisman »

burtonator wrote: post #148

True story... I run a web crawling company named Datastreamer where we license data to social media monitoring firms. We're very white hat... Don't even like to mess around with grey hat areas as we don't want something like the Cambridge Analytica situation coming back to bite us in the ass. About 1.5 years ago we were contacted by a 3rd party firm which we eventually found out was a cut out for Saudi Arabia. The de…

Too bad there are so many people like Manafort who are happy to take on that job for a quick buck. Sure people are being hunted down but check out the ostrich jacket!

Re: Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation

#168

Post by wbl »

yourbandsucks wrote: post #143
sonnyblarney wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#1 is a good point, but in my experience, 'The Governments' approach to Tibetans, Uighurs etc. has the general tacit support of 'The Chinese' and by that I should say 'Han'. Han ethno-nationalism is total and out in the open, it's normative. I suggest most of non-minority China actually supports much of this. As far as #2, it's splitting hairs. People are put in jail because of their ethnicity or faith, and one way o…

And plenty of American overreactions to terror attacks also had broad support. Same for the Russians, the British, the French.. It's definitely interesting that Chinese nationals were almost universally for dragonfly and yet the "progressive" activists didn't care at all, preferring to pivot the topic into nationalist rivalry. Ask them in a vacuum and they'd say they treasure diverse perspectives..

The Chinese nationals who you heard from with the risk of disappearing on their mind. Ai Weiwei wasn't safe.

Re: Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation

#169

Post by yourbandsucks »

wbl wrote: post #168
yourbandsucks wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And plenty of American overreactions to terror attacks also had broad support. Same for the Russians, the British, the French.. It's definitely interesting that Chinese nationals were almost universally for dragonfly and yet the "progressive" activists didn't care at all, preferring to pivot the topic into nationalist rivalry. Ask them in a vacuum and they'd say they treasure diverse perspectives..

The Chinese nationals who you heard from with the risk of disappearing on their mind. Ai Weiwei wasn't safe.

So anyone who disagrees with you is being held hostage? How convenient.

Riskier to speak up pro-dragonfly inside Google on an h-1b visa than it is to speak up against dragonfly from outside China IMO.

Re: Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation

#170

Post by matz1 »

QML wrote: post #114
yadongwen wrote: post #79

This is a great loss to Chinese people who have to use worse products such as Baidu and so.com. I was hoping Google's re-entering could result in a better Internet (or Intranet) ecosystem in China but alas...

Since you are one of the few people who support a re-entry of Google into China, can I ask a question? There is no doubt that a cultural gap exists between Chinese and Americans, and their perceptions of the current Chinese government. Should a foreign company like Google adopt the culture of the country they're entering, or maintain the culture of where they're headquartered? From what I've read, the main opposition…

For me is not thing about culture, its mainly convenient, I travel to china quite often, it sucks to have to mess with vpn which often doesn't work. Human rights issue is little of my concern, it doesn't effect my life in significant way.
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