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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

#291

Post by krageon »

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?

None. And it's not like wikileaks made a lasting and positive change anywhere so far. Plus, after "leaking" it's quite possible your life will be destroyed. Thus the utility becomes a net negative.

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

#292

Post by bufferoverflow »

chippy wrote: post #278
ionised wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would completely set up my family and children for life. This isn't as good an excuse as you think it is. You might want to ask yourself if there is anything you believe in or care about beyond your own genetic code.

One could imagine him thinking about him taking the job as a sacrifice. He will sacrifice his morals and what he cares about for the security of his family and children. He knows that he will sell his soul and be crushed, but he also knows that his family will be okay. It's one of the reasons suicide bombers blow themselves up too. But, as in this case he will live and it ignores the lasting psychological damage on t…

His soul will not necessarily be crushed. Think about it, most of us (well paid IT peoples) could easily spend 10-20% of our income to save some random people across the world from certain death by hunger/thirst/lack of basic meds or infrastructure. Each of us could be literally saving 10-100 people, but almost none of us do. I know I don't. Does it make me a shitty person? Yes. Does it crush me? No. I don't think about the poor dying people most of the time.

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

#293

Post by baybal2 »

jeremysalwen wrote: post #78
freewizard wrote: post #63

AFAICT the way Dragonfly utilizing search log to probe Great Fire Wall blacklist and skip them in results was the same way how google.cn (localized Google search in china) worked. That was a smart but arguable approach, Google was heavily criticized to present those "passively censored" results. However, no one from Google at that time did a #walkout or resign for that. Also notably Google did not quit China for the…

At least according to Sergey at the time, the key issue was "opposing censorship and speaking out for the freedom of political dissent". > Brin: I don't think it's a question of taking on China. In fact, I am a great admirer of both China and the Chinese government for the progress they have made. It is really opposing censorship and speaking out for the freedom of political dissent, and that's the key issue from our…

> > Brin: I don't think it's a question of taking on China. In fact, I am a great admirer of both China and the Chinese government for the progress they have made. It is really opposing censorship and speaking out for the freedom of political dissent, and that's the key issue from our side.

It reads to me like: "I really oppose prostitution, but I go to prostitutes anyways"

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

#294

Post by lclarkmichalek »

ekanes wrote: post #145
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...

Interesting. A friend was just telling me about how inside Apple, the privacy and security teams have special powers. They can shut things down if they put customer data at risk, or allow them conditionally based on needed changes, etc. Very different culturally.

Is it? Apple stores Chinese customer's iCloud keys in Chinese data centers run by a state owned company. https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/17/apples-icloud-user-data-in...

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

#295

Post by sirk1882 »

eitland wrote: post #271
bad_user wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many people on Slashdot Because Slashdot is a good source for unbiased opinions :-)

Seems it is a good source if you want to know what kind of biased opinions the Slashdot crowd has.

| I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.

That seems to be the general consensus on /.

Or at least has been for decades.

I'm partial to the complete and utter destruction of robots using overwhelming force. Except obviously for No 6 and the Boomer bots. They're smoke shows.

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

#296

Post by eitland »

chippy wrote: post #277
eitland wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This quote is interesting in a historic context (WhatsApp uses Moxie's encryption now.): > More to the point, if you’re in Saudi Arabia (or really anywhere), it might be prudent to think about avoiding insecure communication tools like WhatsApp and Viber

Does this mean WhatsApp is okay to use now?

Depending on your threat model, yes. As far as I understand they cannot read the content of your messages, however:

- by default they'll upload backups of your messages to Google cloud.

- (more importantly for me) I really don't trust Facebook to:

1.) not abuse metadata

2.) not mess up security somehow

3.) stand up against whatever oppressive regimes we might see in the future

In addition I don't want to make the Facebook ecosystem any stronger if I can avoid it.

A nice bonus is that I strengthen the network effect of other ecosystems when I use them by default.

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

#297

Post by sirk1882 »

kkarakk wrote: post #263
ychen306 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

people in china don't get a say. many are already irritated by the new points system but are afraid to speak out. china spins every further towards implosion

It's a foolish endeavour not to believe that China is capable of identifying every single citizen based on their internet traffic.

Ad companies have already been doing it for years. As entertaining as Black Mirror is, the episode featuring just such a scenario in China of being capable linking real life identities to online and offline activities for the purposes of a dystopic and a just plain shitty world is very possible. In addition, it's incredibly likely what will happen in China with the social credit system will be much worse than anything you'd see in Black Mirror.

Imagine a world where you could curb the enthusiasm of the entire population for democratic activities or activities that run contrary to state directives. Oh, you said something bad about some mundane activity. Your phone used voice recognition technology to pass that up to the state censor bot. The punitive measures taken can then be expected to occur up to and including an obligatory re-education.

"I pledge allegiance to the great firewall of China and the government of China. I will never make disparaging remarks about any state run corporation or agency, in private and especially not in public ever again."

The State panopticon: VOICE RECOGNITION CONFIRMED SAY THREE HAIL CHINAS AND CONTINUE TO INDOCTRINATION CAMP 3 FOR FURTHER RE-EDUCATION ACTIVITIES

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

#298

Post by JohnBooty »

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…

Good to know there are folks out there doing their best to do the right thing!

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

#299

Post by Lazare »

julienreszka wrote: post #217
Lazare wrote: post #214

It's interesting, because if The Intercept is to be believed, Beaumont has basically gone rogue, carving out his own little empire, aggressively preventing other internal teams from figuring out what he's doing, and engaging in behaviour that violates internal Google rules and policies, as well as which opening Google to significant reputational risk. I mean, I'll be the first to admit I have made mistakes in my care…

Google is large enough to not be a monolith culture have you considered this

I agree completely, but I'm not sure I see how this is a cultural issue, or related to some differences in culture within different parts of Google.

If it turns out that the trading desk at a bank has been violating internal rules and conspiring to hide their trading activity from the risk management committee, we don't say "oh, this is a cultural issue; the commodities desk just has a different culture than the risk management committee", we normally say "you're fired, security will escort you from the building now".

Clearly this is a different situation! But in what way?

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

#300

Post by sonnyblarney »

Despegar wrote: post #2

Great reporting by Gallagher. He should win a Pulitzer for his reporting on Dragonfly. The fact that Pichai refused to say they wouldn't re-enter China shows this is probably just a pause until things die down.

"shows this is probably just a pause until things die down"

It's a pragmatic response, not Machiavellian.

Times change. Situations evolve. It'd be imprudent for G to say they are never going into China.

Xi could change his mind, he could retire, or maybe there's a gaping loophole of some kind in the firewall.

Or maybe China literally opens up the firewall and does some kind of different filtering of their own.

It'd be simply unwise to draw any long term conclusions from it all.

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