Everyday, 1000s and millions of hacking attempts are faced by top firms, worldover. The successful attempts cause damages from small user-level to enterprise-havocs.
Recently, as google reports, they had been facing lots of attacks from Chinese hackers, which were brilliantly forged to hack into the Google’s servers and steal confidential/proprietary information. Google claims that these were “highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China”. But thing that brings even bigger concern is “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”.
In the past, we’ve discussed about How Internet Censorship makes it hard for a normal Chinese Internet user to browse the web. The Great firewall of china is more of a political game that no one will ever understand. Google tells that these attacks were primarily focussed to hack few Gmail accounts that belonged to few advocates of human rights.
Google has faced serious allegations from Chinese governments int he past, all of them had to do with censorship. Google did whatever it could, they even launched a Chinese specific highly censored search engine www.Google.cn in 2006.
Now, Google seems to have lost the hope of continuing to work with China. Google has declared to remove all censorship. And it’s almost 100% sure that Google without censorship means end of Google’s business in China. So here is what the ”New approach to China” is all about:
These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.
Clearly, the situation is beyond the control of what Google could do. Evidently, taking down the shutters is the only way-out.
It was harder of chinese users already. I wonder what’s life is going to be like in absence of the god of Internet.
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