On January the 12th Google announces on it’s official blog that their and other companies’ servers have been the target of sophisticated attacks from China. In the Google Inc official statement there’s not much information concerning these attacks. Were they real? There is no evidence on this matter.
Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. (…) First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses–including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors–have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.
Google also states that the primary goal of the attackers was accesing the e-mail accounts of Chinese human right activists. After these events, Google Inc company threatens withdrawal from the chinese market if the Beijing government will continue the internet censorship policy.
Perhaps you don’t know but google.cn is constrained to filter it’s results. For example, if someone in China is looking up for some informations about Tiananmen Square will not receive any result on the bloody events that took place in this market on the 14th of April 1989.
I really don’t like Google’s hypocrisy:
We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results.
Google didn’t went to China to offer the chinese people a good source of information, it went there to make profit. Google Inc is a company, a business that needs profit. If, for any reasons, it would stop making profit, it would shut down. By offering a source of information is just the way Google is making money.
Yesterday, the american administration declared that they support Google in it’s actions:
We support [Google's] action … in a decision to no longer censor searches that happen using the [Google] platform,” Gibbs told reporters. He added that “our concern is with actions that threaten the universal rights of a free Internet.
Marketwatch
Now let’s see what we have here:
- Google Inc. is one of the biggest and most important American companies, and it has some problems on the chinese market, a market of approximately 350 million users
- Google Inc. supported the actual american administration in it’s election
Is the american administration paying debts from the election to Google, or are we talking about politicizing Google Inc.? Can we continue to trust in the services Google is offering us?
It’s very important that the events in Tiananmen Square do not repeat and the human rights to be respected in all countries. What’s happening in China is a serious problem regarding human rights and acces to information but we don’t believe that this approach is the best idea.
About the title of this article
There was no internet in 1939 and the means of mass information were represented by the radio and the newspaper. Gliwice is a small town in the South of Poland, in 1939 it belong to Germany and it was called Gleiwitz. On August the 31st a local radio station is attacked and occupied, the show is suddenly interrupted and a voice full of hate instigates the polish people to kill any german in their way. On September the 1st World War II unleashes. The occupation of the radio station was a german mission, a false pretend for taking over Poland an unleashing the war. Read more about Gleiwitz incident.
