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This whole situation definitely feels like the start of something much larger than just Google pulling out of China.
by yan 17y ago
This whole situation definitely feels like the start of something much larger than just Google pulling out of China.
- andrewvc 17y agoAgreed, the amount of tight lipped cautiousness with which all parties are proceeding is mighty fishy.
- samdk 17y agoI don't think I'd call Google's announcement either 'tight-lipped' or 'cautious'. It was unprecedented.
- Alex3917 17y ago"This whole situation definitely feels like the start of something much larger than just Google pulling out of China." The assumption in government (and of security researchers) right now is that every time you send an email, it gets read by 25 or so countries. However, they haven't bothered to tell the general public this yet. My guess is that they are going to use this incident to either start to break this news to the general public, or else push through additional computer security measures. Possibly both.
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- randallsquared 17y agoA temporary stopgap, at best, especially in a world where so few people use it. Encryption is maximally useful when people don't see -- or it doesn't matter that people see -- that you're using it. My guess is that people who really, really want to protect what they saying and that they're saying it use nonsense spam as a steganographic medium.
- philwelch 17y agoMaybe they already are--what other purpose would there be for nonsense spam?
- bd 17y agoNonsense spam messes with adaptive spam filters. They learn bad rules, thus it becomes harder to identify real spam. ---- Edit: I don't know how effective it really is, but this seems to be the motivation for why spammers at least try this. Many more details here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_poisoning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_poisoning
- philwelch 17y agoWouldn't you need significantly more noise spam than signal spam for that to work? Is that what we indeed observe?
- randallsquared 17y agoBut since that's a public good (for spammers) it's hard to understand why they'd do it instead of sending a profit-making campaign, any given time.
- mschy 17y agoIf I ran an oppressive, evil regime, one of the first things I'd arrange would be traffic analysis of encrypted or otherwise suspicious email.
- tedunangst 17y agoConsidering most of the email I send is from gmail to gmail, if it's getting read by 25 or so countries, Google has much bigger problems than they've been letting on.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- Estragon 17y agoYeah, might be a good time to get out of US dollars. They're going to be painful to hold, if China decides to make the US uncomfortable.
- billswift 17y agoI voted this up, even though I think it's wrong, because it is a valid point. I don't think it's going to happen though, because it would screw up their own economy as badly as the US. Maybe if things weren't already so tight everywhere right now, but probably not even then.
- blahedo 17y ago...for now. There will come a time when dumping their dollars will no longer disadvantage China, and will indeed be to their advantage; but they need a somewhat larger middle class first. Give it ten or twenty years.
- rdtsc 17y agoInteresting point. It is a sort of a MEAD (Mutually Economic Assured destruction), a complement to the nuclear MAD.
- zmimon 17y agoYou would want to be extremely careful - despite all logic against it, the US Dollar spikes when just about any international crisis takes hold. The dollar's decline might well occur afterwards, but that would be a longer term consequence.
- MikeCapone 17y agoIf China kills the dollar by dumping their reserves, they're going to hurt themselves just as much if not more than the US. They wouldn't do that over just Google. That's small potatoes compared to that...
- anigbrowl 17y agoI'd call it the opening salvo in a trade war, if not a new cold war. Expect to see a lot of political pressure for other companies to 'follow Google' and repatriate manufacturing operations and the like.
- aaronblohowiak 17y agoOur economy cannot function without cheap imports.
- fungi 17y agoFix Mexico (legalize it)
- zmimon 17y agoI've never understood why America outsources so much half way around the planet for cheap labor when it is available on her doorstep - a short flight, easy transport, same time zone , reasonably stable, friendly democracy ... what's not to like?
- delackner 17y agoI can't find hard numbers on China's violent crime rate, but Mexico is around #6 per-capita in the WORLD. Might have something to do with it...
- Tangurena 17y agoSending manufacturing to China and other SE Asian countries is far cheaper than even Mexican labor. While 1 day's wages of a median Mexican assembly worker is less than 1 hour of a median domestic US assembly worker's wages; 1 day's wages of a median Chinese assembly worker is cheaper than 1 hour of the media Mexican worker. There were some articles last year (or maybe it was 2008) about textile manufacturing in the US, and how the Chinese were subsidizing them to the point where even if the US workers worked for free, the US plants could not compete on price. To understand how much manufacturing changed, I recommend reading The Box. The shipping container totally changed everything by reducing shipping costs by about 98%. A lot of cities that used to be manufacturing centers (such as NYC and Detroit) withered, and a lot of cities that used to be shipping centers (such as NYC and London) also shriveled up because they could not support container traffic. http://www.amazon.com/Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller-Economy/dp/0691136408/ http://www.amazon.com/Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller-Economy...