41–50 of 83 posts
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It would have been easy to write a less disingenuous headline. For example, "U.S. Compelled Google To Hand Over Wikileaks Volunteer's Gmail Data."
That's what the headline reads now - what was it before?
> Google Hands Wikileaks Volunteer's Gmail Data to U.S. Government
Implies that Google did so out of free will rather then being legally compelled to.
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Even if you host it yourself but at a regular hosting provider "they" might just confiscate your servers. Increasing email encryption usability might be the road out of this dilemma. Otherwise email encryption is going to stay within a very small circle of users.
When I said "Host your own" I meant on a physically secure box using full disk encryption. But I do like the idea of encryption, GPG does this really well already but key distribution is still a problem. Just an idea for a secure physical box: Throw in a external "always on" GPS receiver on the box and have it physically destroy the hard drive if it is outside of a certain area or if it detects a certain amount of mo…
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> Electronic Communications Privacy Act Orwellian naming conventions are all the rage these days :-) Jerry Yang faced a lot of heat for doing pretty much the same thing in China. Google seems to reluctant to criticize the US government now, unlike, for e.g., the Chinese government.
EXACTLY the same thing. It's a really interesting point. When China does it, they're horrible. When the US does it, what is it? Is there a difference or not? The motivations are quite similar, and one probably can only look at whether the motivations of each country can be justified from a moral standpoint.
I don't necessarily believe that China's status as an expeditionary market makes it worthwhile to stop offering services in that country, just playing devil's advocate I guess.
Applebaum, a tor developer, is i am sure astute enough not to leave unencrypted mails on gmail. he is used to governmental abuse at airpoets etc., so i am sure he saw this coming.
FYI it's "Appelbaum".
Maybe Americans should use European hosts and Europeans can use American ones. Does anyone know of any good international webmail providers, with SSL?
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EXACTLY the same thing. It's a really interesting point. When China does it, they're horrible. When the US does it, what is it? Is there a difference or not? The motivations are quite similar, and one probably can only look at whether the motivations of each country can be justified from a moral standpoint.
Perhaps the discontent comes because China is seen as something of an expeditionary market for American search providers. While you can give China the finger and get out, it's not tenable to do that in the US, so one is compelled to play by American rules. I don't necessarily believe that China's status as an expeditionary market makes it worthwhile to stop offering services in that country, just playing devil's advo…
Imagine google coming right out and saying: 'Our do no evil motto is our guiding light and we have decided that being forced by the government to act in this manner to prevent our technology from being used to spy on American citizens in ways that we can not in good conscience allow is against our principles. Therefore we will cease operating today.'.
I'm trying to imagine the effect of such a move, it strikes me that the ensuing fall-out would probably see the government as the losing party and google re-instated in very short order.
Sometimes you have to make a stand, if the same thing was a good enough reason for google to cease to do business in China then maybe it should be good enough to cease doing business in the US.
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Perhaps the discontent comes because China is seen as something of an expeditionary market for American search providers. While you can give China the finger and get out, it's not tenable to do that in the US, so one is compelled to play by American rules. I don't necessarily believe that China's status as an expeditionary market makes it worthwhile to stop offering services in that country, just playing devil's advo…
Collaboration with a bad government is always optional, you can cease to do business. That's definitely tenable. It takes a lot of balls to do so. Imagine google coming right out and saying: 'Our do no evil motto is our guiding light and we have decided that being forced by the government to act in this manner to prevent our technology from being used to spy on American citizens in ways that we can not in good consci…
The reality is that governments do have the ability to dictate a lot. But companies are global now and that means some competition exists. It's old news that countries compete on tax laws but competing on rights and freedoms would be nice too. To a certain extent, they do.
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Collaboration with a bad government is always optional, you can cease to do business. That's definitely tenable. It takes a lot of balls to do so. Imagine google coming right out and saying: 'Our do no evil motto is our guiding light and we have decided that being forced by the government to act in this manner to prevent our technology from being used to spy on American citizens in ways that we can not in good consci…
They could have made more of a fuss over it. Get ideas up in the air about shifting pieces of Google overseas, for example. Once the idea that Google might be locating somewhere else for concern about collaborating with the US government, public concern might have been raised. The reality is that governments do have the ability to dictate a lot. But companies are global now and that means some competition exists. It'…
Also the economy there could use a boost I believe.
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Perhaps the discontent comes because China is seen as something of an expeditionary market for American search providers. While you can give China the finger and get out, it's not tenable to do that in the US, so one is compelled to play by American rules. I don't necessarily believe that China's status as an expeditionary market makes it worthwhile to stop offering services in that country, just playing devil's advo…
Collaboration with a bad government is always optional, you can cease to do business. That's definitely tenable. It takes a lot of balls to do so. Imagine google coming right out and saying: 'Our do no evil motto is our guiding light and we have decided that being forced by the government to act in this manner to prevent our technology from being used to spy on American citizens in ways that we can not in good consci…
Bureaucrats and spooks are happy to play this game because they know it never comes back to them. Nobody who has to answer to voters would dare put their name on it-- we're looking for any damn excuse to not vote for the incumbent this cycle.
But I guess standing up for us could mean a hit to shareholder value, and some things just aren't worth sacrificing.