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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

#221

Post by fipple »

redisman wrote: post #167
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!

Evil is more banal than that. I have no ostrich jacket but I’d create a spying tool for an authoritarian government for the right price. For me it would be about $5-10 million.

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

#222

Post by tlear »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #144
manfredo wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing the point. Ask the question "What is the most effective way of curbing sectarian violence?". Both Chinese and Westerners agree that sectarian violence is bad - that's the same underlying ethical value. But the answer to that question will probably differ. At least in the US we try to curb sectarian violence by promoting tolerance and integration. Historically that had worked pretty well for us,…

No, I'm definitely not missing your point, I'm disagreeing, fyi and your comment is shocking and repulsive. You are justifying, on cultural grounds, the mass incarceration of a minority because 'they could pose a potential social problem, even though they are not presently' which is abhorrent. Yes a 'cultural context' of Han ethnocentric racism and open bigotry, perhaps, but of course this isn't really justifying any…

Think of it as how Americans are completely tolerant of communists while people who lived under communist rule tend to be not so much. Americans have not experienced Cheka, Holodomor or Cultural Revolution. They also have not experienced Taiping rebellion or any of the other massive slaughters that happened in China over religion. Think 30 year war except it happened quite recently.

Would I be ok now with now with grabbing every random moron wearing commie t-shirt and throwing him into re-education camp? No. 15 year old me who just finished reading Archipelag Gulag and was finally told my family history during Holodomor? Well I would get a rope, find a tree and get to work.

Things like this are very complicated. Having said that Google is idiotic trying to reenter PRC market. Communist party will never allow them to grow to any degree there if they have any independence, they would need to become a servant of the party 100%, even then.. likely they will just get all of their tech stolen and bunch of intelligence officers placed into leadership roles. There is NO path for them to grow in China and succeed, what they sell is too valuable for control of people to allow foreign controlled entity any growth inside PRC.

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

#223

Post by jjcc »

manfredo wrote: post #154
sonnyblarney wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm definitely not missing your point, I'm disagreeing, fyi and your comment is shocking and repulsive. You are justifying, on cultural grounds, the mass incarceration of a minority because 'they could pose a potential social problem, even though they are not presently' which is abhorrent. Yes a 'cultural context' of Han ethnocentric racism and open bigotry, perhaps, but of course this isn't really justifying any…

The point is, it's not because > they could pose a potential social problem, even though they are not presently It's because > This region is exhibiting separatism over religious lines, and our country has an established pattern of religous separatist movements turning into catastrophic wars that claim tens of millions of lives. In short, while Westerners might see mass incarceration of religous minorities and think,…

Your understanding of this issue is much better than many HNers on the reason why the "concentration camp" exist. Most HNers get all information from West Media with many convincing "evidence" with map and photo analysis. That's why you "appall".

However, there are other sources of information selectively filtered by media. For example,here's a story of a famous Uhigyr celebrity went back to her alma mater (in Chinese):

https://www.backchina.com/news/2018/11/20/594759.html

The Uhigyr celebirties are disproportional more than Han based on their poplulation. But they seems to work/live like nothing happen although the whole world are angry. There are 2 possible reason:s

1. They(all of them) don't care about their compatriot

2. They know the "camps" but they also know the real nature of the "camps".

Most Chinese know these celebrities very well through entertainment news. One even show up on TV almost everyday. If you were a Chinese , which reason would you bet?

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

#224

Post by russdpale »

oh_sigh wrote: post #219
russdpale wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Maybe I'm lacking in morality but I don't understand how serving censored content to people that already live in a society where the content is censored is considered evil.

Well, its a line that everyone has, and its probably a little bit different for everyone. Plus I think there are real concerns about googles extremely cozy relationship with the all-seeing-eyes nations.

Beyond that, though, the early internet was very progressive and I think a lot of people saw google as a chance to show the world the good things that technology was capable of. I don't think anyone would argue that some curation is a great thing.. no one wants to find dentists in kansas if they live in montreal of course. I would honestly prefer that breitbart and publications of its ilk be filtered out of my results... but where is the line? Up until recently google was scanning people's emails, which seems a bit dystopian.

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

#225

Post by known »

Blocked in China:

   - Google search 
   - Facebook 
   - YouTube 
   - Wikipedia (Chinese) 
   - Twitter 
   - Netflix 
   - Instagram 
   - Tumblr 
   - WhatsApp 
   - BBC 
   - New York Times 
   - Bloomberg 
   - Reuters 
   - WSJ 
   - TIME 
   - The Economist
Not blocked:

   - Amazon 
   - Ebay 
   - Yahoo 
   - LinkedIn 
   - Bing 
   - Apple 
   - MSN
https://twitter.com/spectatorindex/status/102051772640034406...

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

#226

Post by erikb »

ineedasername wrote: post #162

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. P…

The political battle against Pichai made a success. So now the public support can be tuned down and Google can move on to do the only thing they could do in their current situation: building tools for the chinese gov to enter the market. They'll probably do the same thing behind closed doors and without the public Google label on the final result. Maybe baidu will suddenly provide better search results or something.

That's how this world works, and it's not like they really have a choice in that matter.

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

#227

Post by ychen306 »

int_19h wrote: post #195
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.

According to the rumors, Dragonfly goes far beyond censorship, in that it has provisions to identify specific people from search queries. So it's not just that searching for "Tiananmen Square" wouldn't give any useful results, but it'd also let the Big Brother know who was inappropriately curious. Combine this with their upcoming social credit system, and you can easily see how this is proactively helping build an au…

> but it'd also let the Big Brother know who was inappropriately curious.

This changed my opinion. I thought the controversy was unwarranted; after all it's what many people in China wants. It's good that Google doesn't follow through.

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

#228

Post by snovv_crash »

ehsankia wrote: post #216
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...

I'm sorry, but almost every peace of information about Dragonfly we have is from the intercept, which has for source people who clearly are very biased against the project. So while we can come up with dozens of rumors that shine it in a very bad light, I'm not sure how fair that is, since we're missing the other half of the story. With enough selective "facts", I can make almost anything look bad.

This is a tisk any organization involved in secret projects risks. If you won't control the narrative, someone else will.

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

#229

Post by schuke »

abc-xyz wrote: post #207
schuke wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google in China won’t make the people more oppressed. It gives us a tool for searchinng. It’s better than being oppressed AND have nothing to search with.

It most definitely would make the people more oppressed. Even if we ignore the fact that the searches would be directly tied to a person, as well as the fact that there are nobody better than Google when it comes to tracking users on mass-scale, then you just have to think about all the people who would stop using VPNs as a result of this. You'd also be a fool to believe that China wouldn't slowly force Google to ass…

All domestic online activities are already linked to individuals. All apps and websites are required by law to do this so the marginal harm of having a censored Google is minimal, if any. People use VPN for a lot more than political searches on Google: Youtube, Instagram, Steam, Wikipedia etc. It's unlikely a censored Google will discourage using them all. on The other hand for those who'll never use VPN services, another search engine choice will greatly improve their access to information, especially in non-Chinese languages.
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