Google's Project Dragonfly 'Terminated' in China

Post by reallydude » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 9:04 PM UTC

khc wrote: post #131

ctime wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enabling censorship and oppression should not be a race to the bottom - which is what you are advocating for. I don't understand how any search engine approved in China could be "surfacing better information in queries" - they are all effectively under the same authoritative control. Are you placing your believe in hopes and prayers that real information will be "accidentally" leaked to the oppressed masses in China?…

How am I advocating for race to the bottom?

Post by gurkendoktor » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 9:08 PM UTC

dirtyid wrote: post #230

laughinghan wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comment you're replying to said Air Canada, British Airways, and Lufthansa. I just tried searching for a flight to Taipei in all three of them, from California, and all of their autocompletes indeed mention China. You are also incorrect that AA / United / Delta removed references to "China" for Chinese cities. I just tried them, Beijing, Shanghai etc all continue to mention China. Only Taipei's autocomplete does…

I was initially referring to the Emirates Taiwanese flag pin incident, and other cockpit paraphernalia drama from a couple years ago. Airlines had existing protocol of scrubbing physical Taiwanese references when operating (i.e. landing) in China. I wasn't of airline site scrubbing Taiwan, which again, I don't see a big deal. Making countries recognize dejure sovereignty is only "bullying" if you drank too much US ko…

Post by prewett » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 9:14 PM UTC

Fej wrote: post #245

khc wrote: post #86

As an overseas Chinese (born and grew up in Hong Kong but have relatives in China) I am sadden by this and HN comments. Any claim that Google would have helped China censor Chinese citizens ignores the fact that Chinese search engines are already censored. Because laws in this area are often vague, I can see that dragonfly would apply varying levels of censorships and as a side effect, allow people to access some inf…

It is not, strictly speaking, about censorship. Google is the best in the world at gathering information about people. If they operate in China, they will have to give over all that information to the Chinese government, of course. They have already built the largest surveillance apparatus in the Western world that has ever existed - imagine what the CCP could do with that? Yes, Baidu already does this. But no one ca…

Post by aclsid » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 9:44 PM UTC

gentro wrote: post #63

chrischen wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any sort of heavy hand the West takes to “prove” that whatever it is that China is doing (censorship, communism, etc) is wrong/doesn’t work is going to backfire to the highest degree. It will entrench them in their already strong beliefs that the West is only interested in holding progress back from China (out of jealousy at their high economic growth). If you believe your system is better, then you really should not…

Also if you ask regular Chinese people if they want a censored version of google, most of them would probably say hell yea, when does it launch? What’s the alternative? Only other censored search engines. And Chinese people know baidu search results suck ass compared to google’s. So basically the western commentariat killing off dragonfly has a demonstrably negative impact on Chinese quality of life. But we’re only t…

Post by PavlovsCat » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 10:05 PM UTC

khc wrote: post #86

As an overseas Chinese (born and grew up in Hong Kong but have relatives in China) I am sadden by this and HN comments. Any claim that Google would have helped China censor Chinese citizens ignores the fact that Chinese search engines are already censored. Because laws in this area are often vague, I can see that dragonfly would apply varying levels of censorships and as a side effect, allow people to access some inf…