Google Accuses China of Interfering With Gmail 131
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Soulskill
from the caught-red-handed dept.
from the caught-red-handed dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The Guardian reports that Google has accused the Chinese government of interfering with Gmail. According to the search giant, Chinese customers and advertisers have increasingly been complaining about their Gmail service in the past month and attempts by users to send messages, mark messages as unread and use other services have generated problems for Gmail customers. The announcement follows a blog posting from Google on 11 March in which the firm said it had 'noticed some highly targeted and apparently politically motivated attacks against our users. We believe activists may have been a specific target.' The search firm is not commenting further on this latest attack, but technology experts said it seemed to show an increasingly high degree of sophistication."
Re:Why always 'blame China' and not 'blame Chinese (Score:3, Informative)
Posting AC as to avoid undoing a previous mod.
I find it interesting that, when the media talk about Chinese hackers, they invariably refer to it as attacks by "China" -- not "Chinese hackers", as would be the case in just about any other country in the world.
Can we really always assume that the Chinese government or China as a country is behind each and every attack, or is it just the work of some extremists within the country's borders?
The reason that people usually say "China" as opposed to "Chinese" is that most hackers within China are affiliated with the government. There are units both in the People's Liberation Army and in the Chinese State Security apparatus that are devoted solely to hacking and other forms of online attacks. Most university students studying these things are getting recruited by the government, if not having their education paid for by the government. The university professors teaching them are virtually kept on call by the government. I actually wrote a paper that dealt with this for one of my graduate-level IR classes, unfortunately it was in my old laptop so I lost it, so I can't give you the exact sources or unit designations devoted to this.
Re:Behind the Red Door... (Score:3, Informative)
We're amateurs at invading privacy and interfering with commerce compared to those guys...
But here's the rub... in Chinese culture, the state is viewed as the great benefactor of all, your generous uncle, a friendly neighbor. This isn't just propaganda pushed by the Communists, but something that reaches way back into the dynastic periods. It's also one of the few things my SO and I ever really get into big misunderstandings about... to her, the state, while not 100% infallible, always has the people's interests at heart, while to me (and just about any other "westerner"), the state is something to be distrusted even in the best of times. Take a random poll, and most Chinese will agree that "disharmonious" websites such as pr0n (it gets in the way of loving your spouse, after all) ought to be censored or blocked. Sure, to us it's a '1984' style crash-course to the police state, but to them, it's only fitting and proper that impressionable people be protected from seeing someone's naughty bits.
Re:Yeah, my heroes (Score:4, Informative)
Google China stopped serving censored results. Source: The very same Wikipedia article you reference.