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

• matz1 8y ago
  This is sucks, well, I hope they can start it again in the future.
• Despegar 8y ago
  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.
  • ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    Indeed, every part of this story really happened because of Ryan's coverage. His reveal is what brought it to the attention of other Google employees, members of Congress, and human rights groups. And eventually, it appears key information he released is what also led to it's effective closure. It's a true testament to the power of quality investigative journalism.
    • dmitrygr 8y ago
      > His reveal is what brought it to > the attention of other Google > employees Sad truth. And yet, <<we're a "very open" company that "encourages internal debate">>
      • sfilargi 8y ago
        Don't consume the corporate cool-aid. Google, and for that matter any other company, is not its employees, it is its stockholders.
        • rjf72 8y ago
          I would agree with you in general but this is probably not the best example of it. Sergey Brin and Larry Page own a majority of the voting shares at Google. So even though it's technically a public company, it's still for all intents and purposes their company. It's the same story with Zuckerberg and Facebook which is why things like 'shareholders calling for Zuckerberg to be replaced' don't really mean anything directly. If every single shareholder except Zuckerberg voted to replace him, he stays. Consequently the actions and behaviors of these companies strongly reflect the views and desires of these individuals.
      • josteink 8y ago
        You’re free to internal debate. Just be prepared to be fired over stating elementary biological facts, like how men and women are different. I bet James Damore really appreciates how he used this freedom in this tolerant company.
        • dang 8y ago
          Please don't break the site guidelines by introducing extraneous flamebait into threads. Especially not of the most-repeated variety. Those are the antibiotic-resistant bacteria of HN threads. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • cromwellian 8y ago
      You mean, it really happened because a brave Google employee leaked it. If this employee had leaked the same memo to Wikileaks, or the Washington Post, or any other mechanism of widespread dissemination would have been the same. This is like giving credit to Glenn Greenwald instead of Edward Snowden, or Reality Winner, or Chelsea Manning. The real people who take the risks end up in the back, while the reporters end up with all the prestige on the stage.
      • Despegar 8y ago
        If the whistle blowers wanted the prestige there's a way they could have done that: go on-the-record. They chose not to, perhaps fearing retaliation, which is fine. I don't see how that takes away at all from Ryan Gallagher. His stories had multiple sources so it's not like the Edward Snowden situation at all. He got the original scoop, and as far as I can tell, all the follow-up stories as well. And it's not like the story has concluded anyway. Google's management still seems inclined to launching in China, they just want the heat to go away right now.
        • cromwellian 8y ago
          No one's saying he didn't do any work, but when a whistleblower's memo lands in your lap, it's mana from heaven. Had the memo landed at the Guardian, or WashPo, we'd be complimenting the brilliant work of a reporter there. There are reporters who sift through enormous historical records, conduct undercover investigative interviews, and uncover information that was hard fought, and hard won. That's quite a bit different than following up on a golden goose. Also, 'going on the record' isn't always an option. In the case of someone like Reality Winner, Chelsea Manning, or Edward Snowden, it would mean life in prison -- or worse if they were in a non-Western democracy.
  • user2426679 8y ago
    Agreed that this is a great example by Gallagher of all-too-rare "real" journalism. The unfortunate thing is that the headline of this article should probably be "Google's Secret China Project Now Even More Secret."
    • shaki-dora 8y ago
      How would that work? A secret search engine? Or Google pretending to give in under pressure from employees, then turn around and tell them (and everyone else) "haha, we lied" and launching it? How would that not create far larger harm than just not giving in in the first place?
      • tivert 8y ago
        > Or Google pretending to give in under pressure from employees, then turn around and tell them (and everyone else) "haha, we lied" and launching it? How would that not create far larger harm than just not giving in in the first place? Google hasn't pretended to give in to pressure from employees. Project Dragonfly is still being worked on: > In recent weeks, teams working on Dragonfly have been told to use different datasets for their work. They are no longer gathering search queries from mainland China and are instead now studying “global Chinese” queries that are entered into Google from people living in countries such as the United States and Malaysia ...and Google has made no promises that they won't launch it in the future: > Pichai stated that “right now” there were no plans to launch the search engine, though refused to rule it out in the future. Google had originally aimed to launch Dragonfly between January and April 2019. Leaks about the plan and the extraordinary backlash that ensued both internally and externally appear to have forced company executives to shelve it at least in the short term... I think the title overstates the situation. This doesn't seem so much like an end to the project than an internal political squabble. It seems like 265.com was purchased to do exactly what the Google Privacy Team has forbidden. I don't know Google's internal politics, but I'd be surprised if its privacy team has enough power to hobble one of the CEO's priorities enough to actually kill it.
        • jiveturkey 8y ago
  • corey_moncure 8y ago
    >just a pause Exactly. It's the same tactic employed with various authoritarian measures such as the DMCA, TPP, SOPA, etc. Unpalatable to the public is a temporary condition. They overplayed their hand this time, but corporations are slaves to the inexorable demands of "shareholder value", and those who stand to profit will ratchet up the pressure, notch by notch. This will be back in a year, and then a year hence, and by the Nth exposure the public will have been sufficiently desensitized to it.
  • jim_rayner13 8y ago
    He should investigate how Google blatantly tricks and or steals IP from researchers, open source developers, poor innovators, etc.... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929 http://fortune.com/2017/10/08/eli-attia-lawsuit-google-racketeering/ http://fortune.com/2017/10/08/eli-attia-lawsuit-google-racke... https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/inventor-says-google-is-patenting-work-he-put-in-the-public-domain/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/inventor-says-go...
  • sonnyblarney 8y ago
    "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.
  • drited 8y ago
    Yeah Pichai came across as sneakily dishonest in in the recent congressional hearing. He implied they weren't currently planning to enter Chinese search with a filtered search tool but then admitted they had 100 engineers working on dragonfly. Okay sleazebag so you're not currently planning to enter but you are building the systems that will allow a future plan to happen. Him saying they have no plans to enter prior to that admission indicates that he has flexible morals. Why wouldn't a sleazebag like that continue 'not planning' until the time is right for him to reap his profits?
• izacus 8y ago
  Great! So will Apple employees walk out next in protest of Apple assisting Chinese government by giving them iMessage and iCloud data? Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud-insight/apple-moves-to-store-icloud-keys-in-china-raising-human-rights-fears-idUSKCN1G8060 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud-insigh...
  • lern_too_spel 8y ago
    Unlike Dragonfly, that actually launched. There was no reported dissent from Apple employees before or after launch. What are they waiting for? The workers at Google who protested despite the loss in value of their equity should be commended.
    • robertAngst 8y ago
      Sad you got downvotes. No one is loyal to Google. Apple fanboys have a double standard that I don't understand, maybe its a social club.
    • bitL 8y ago
      Maybe: 1. the ones expressing dissent were caught in internal Apple network and subsequently quietly laid off for whatever official reason, preemptively 2. reporting such news could cost a reporter highly in the future; surely getting no access to latest Apple stuff but other SV companies are watching as well 3. "can do no wrong" culture
  • tomatotomato37 8y ago
    Apple has a very significant manufactoring presence in China, so unfortunately they can't cleanly separate from China like Google can without risking retaliation
    • creato 8y ago
      This is exactly why companies shouldn't be involved with business in China.
    • 8y ago
• onetimemanytime 8y ago
  China is a world on its own. Google sees the writing on the wall, enter China or become FB (talk about a has-been.) Google, FB etc need 20% quarter to quarter growth and Google has pretty much saturated the western world. So it is China...kiss the ring and all. Google is not going to lose market cap because of so called values. They're so 2005
  • bobthepanda 8y ago
    Who needs 20% YoY growth? Plenty of big companies get big enough and don't keel over, and Google is already very profitable.
    • onetimemanytime 8y ago
      Who needs 20% YoY growth? Google does. If not 20%, around that number.... Trailing P/E 38.67 Forward P/E 1 21.87 https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOGL/key-statistics?p=GOOGL https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOGL/key-statistics?p=GOOGL
      • sigstoat 8y ago
        how do you turn a P/E of 21 into needing somewhere between 20% annual growth (your current claim?) and 200% annual growth (your original claim? 20% quarter over quarter.)
• mmmmmmmmm 8y ago
  Sad day for the Chinese people who will now still be censored, but also have fewer choices.
• aaomidi 8y ago
  So many people here only look at the business cost of what Google wanted to do and don't care about the human cost. It's great that you were born in a western country with a good understanding of freedom and your rights. The majority of the world don't have these conditions. Your "business" decision effects billions of people in the world. I was born and mostly raised in Iran. "Business" decisions from companies that sold the government DPI equipment made sense for them, their shareholders, and their investors. But at what cost? Iran is a very young country in terms of population age. Many Iranians simply didn't have the opportunity to grow simply because a few companies wanted more $$$ in their pockets. If you in any way support these decisions while having complete freedom not to, then you're complicit. You're part of the reason so many countries have a lost/dark generation. You're part of the cause of so much suffering in the world. Good on you Google Engineers who stood against making a few $ of profit to stop the suffering of many, many people.
  • _iyig 8y ago
    What is DPI equipment? I’m not familiar with the acronym.
    • gresrun 8y ago
      Deep Packet Inspection [0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_packet_inspection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_packet_inspection
      • krackers 8y ago
        Doesn't TLS defeat this?
        • MrOwen 8y ago
          Not necessarily. You are correct in that you can't look at the literal messages inside the packets anymore but you can make educated assumptions based on usage patterns and packet sizes combined with data that's already in the header. Just take a look at this almost 3 year old submission detailing someone's experience with the Great Firewall: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10905076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10905076 Since that was 3 years ago, I suspect there's much more advanced network wizardry available today.
• baybal2 8y ago
  > Google has used 265.com as a honeypot for market research, storing information about Chinese users’ searches before sending them along to Baidu. I can't resist to post a meme here https://www.news.com.au/technology/online/censorship/chinas-war-on-words-anything-be-it-a-phrase-or-picture-that-can-be-used-to-insult-xi-has-been-banned/news-story/a8e5a9d558b3ed0465e1fc020e2d6c2c https://www.news.com.au/technology/online/censorship/chinas-...
• vlmlee 8y ago
  Do we really want a proliferation of next-gen monitoring and surveillance software? Isn't this what we were warned about?
  • kmlx 8y ago
    this ship passed about 30 years ago.
• fatjokes 8y ago
  "Traditional" companies like Amazon, Apple and Oracle heavily punish employees for banding together, freely communicating and protesting like this, so they would never have the opportunity to protest controversial projects like this. I fear the main lesson corporate leaders will take from this is to lockdown on employee freedom.
  • tracker1 8y ago
    Apparently that lock down has already started (regarding leaking).
  • 706f6f70 8y ago
    I think the main lesson from Google was make sure the mainstream media agrees with your point prior to protesting it. If the media does not agree, they will ask for your head(s) and threaten to boycott your employer until it is delivered on a silver platter. The number of people protesting is inconsequential as platters can be built to accommodate a near infinite number of heads.
• yogenpro 8y ago
  Weird. I've been primarily using Internet in China, and I have never heard of 265.com before. I believe that's also the case for most Chinese Internet users. I doubt how valuable the data collected from that site would be.
• sunstone 8y ago
  It seems Google has now strayed far from the "don't be evil" path. First came the illegal agreement not to hire from other tech companies, then the "say nothing to no one" employment agreement all employees have to sign and now this product the help Mr. Xi put the jack boot to every neck in China. I've probably missed a few, please fill in the blanks if you can. To a large extent Google's business, like Enron's before it, depends largely on the trust of its users. Once it begins to wobble, head for the hills.
  • ganzuul 8y ago
    Less colored than your take, but; Each time they cancel a beta, a vast amount of engineering work gets laid to waste. These engineers could be making the world a better place in other industries.
    • icebraining 8y ago
      Other industries cancel products too. Something like 80% of all drugs that start being test never make it to market, for example. Other industries will have multiple draft proposals being drawn up, often at great cost, only to dismiss all except one.
      • ganzuul 8y ago
        I know, I just don't think it being common makes it right. There are also untold numbers of fascinating patents which never see commercial success, duplication of effort, and arguing about who gets the biggest slice of a cake that doesn't exist yet. It's ineffective, and therefore I don't like it.
    • snaky 8y ago
      Or worse place. In other industries.
      • ganzuul 8y ago
        I must ask; which industry could be worse than software for this?
• freewizard 8y ago
  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 criticism it received, but for a later government sponsored hack targeting its code and service known as Operation Aurora. So to compare 8~10 years ago and now, it seems GOOG leadership hasn't change much on what they think they can do (aka "moral compass"); Google employee did become more active on these issues which I think is progressive.
  • freewizard 8y ago
    Also privacy concern of using 265.com data seems nothing but a process issue. Aggregating search log is such a common task for any search engine in US and EU, there has to be a way to achieve that while comply all the privacy/legal concern. Dragonfly lead skipping that is unwise and unnecessary IMHO.
  • jeremysalwen 8y ago
    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 side. >SPIEGEL: Four years ago, you allowed your service to be censored. Why have you changed your mind now? >Brin: The hacking attacks were the straw that broke the camel's back. There were several aspects there: the attack directly on Google, which we believe was an attempt to gain access to Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. But there is also a broader pattern we then discovered of simply the surveillance of human rights activists. http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/google-co-founder-on-pulling-out-of-china-it-was-a-real-step-backward-a-686269.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/google-co-found...
    • 8y ago
• shaki-dora 8y ago
  Now where are the people claiming nothing but quitting, and not even that, would ever change a company's decision? Or how not investing in China will get Google managers thrown into a dark Delaware jail for wasting an opportunity to maximise shareholder value?
  • saalweachter 8y ago
    Flame wars are no place for straw men.
• yadongwen 8y ago
  This is a great loss to Chinese people who have to use worse products such as Baidu and so.com. I was hoping Google's re-entering could result in a better Internet (or Intranet) ecosystem in China but alas...
  • praptak 8y ago
    Maybe Chinese people could take it up with their government?
    • matz1 8y ago
      Maybe google could simply fire those who oppose ?
    • sparkie 8y ago
      Chinese cannot even type "I disagree" on social media without it being censored. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJc4KgBCdoM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJc4KgBCdoM
  • wnevets 8y ago
    with all of the human rights violations inside of china like forced labor camps for muslims, having to use baidu hardly seems like a great lost.
  • darpa_escapee 8y ago
    Perhaps Chinese citizens can petition the Chinese Communist Party to foster a better foreign investment environment by putting an immediate end to the forced imprisonment[1], labor[2] and torture[3] of millions of people in China. [1] Tracking China’s Muslim Gulag: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/muslims-camps-china/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/muslims-... [2] China’s Detention Camps for Muslims Turn to Forced Labor: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/16/world/asia/xinjiang-china-forced-labor-camps-uighurs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/16/world/asia/xinjiang-china... [3] Woman describes torture, beatings in Chinese detention camp: https://www.apnews.com/61cdf7f5dfc34575aa643523b3c6b3fe https://www.apnews.com/61cdf7f5dfc34575aa643523b3c6b3fe
  • 8y ago
• iaw 8y ago
  > 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...
  • Nasrudith 8y ago
    Well it is clearly an authoritarian personality - don't question his decisions and just obey. Sucks to work under but isn't usually quite as bad as an authoritarian government. And really that sort of thing should be a reason to be fired instantly from a tech company - not because of employee morale, expecting people you pay to think not to think being bad management, ethics, or anything like that but just because that it is a massive security liability. If your boss really is the sort to demand to send over all employee records over email or else you are fired that makes everyone far more phishing vulnerable. Of course if it is 'disregard safety procedures both can kill you just the same'.
    • debt 8y ago
      Idk probably knew they weren’t breaking any laws and also wanted to hit an aggressive deadline. That is if any of his engineers had qualms about what they were doing they’d be checked at the door because again it’s all legal according to the law and they had to hit a deadline. Especially because there’s nothing here that’s technically exceptional other than it runs counter to what we Americans considered ethical. Glad the PR fallout tipped whatever cost-benefit analysis they did by severely damaging the Google brand. Crazy they didn’t consider it up front. The fallout feels similar to them the release of the Boston Dynamics video. They don’t want to be associated with “job automating” robots.
      • Nasrudith 8y ago
        I think the issue is less PR but more labor dispute essentially - the high end having greviances is rarer but it does happen. They can weather being just another evil corporation reputationally - they can't weather mass defections of expensive talent that may decide to go to competitors or go Traitorous Eight on them. They have a pattern there of being forced to bend since at least the "memo-gate" and although they don't like it the math is clear enough to them. If employees are making money net it is rational to replace them if the alternative could make more money. Willful employees are an annoyance with a relative liability to corporate but their productivity gives them cold rational sway that says "just add it to the employee expenses section if you know what is good for you". It isn't ideal for everyone - indeed it works because they are outliers. If everyone can do flawless brain surgery it no longer demands a premium no matter how difficult it is. It is in some ways more powerful than traditional labor - they organize because they need the company. Companies can decide to leave and out source to cheaper locales in response. Powerful labor has few equivalent alternatives. I say powerful and not scarce because mere obscurity can be subsituited for - powerful less so. If they could have already they would have. The companies need the high end and they know it. Just look at Hollywood movie budgets to the stars - they can ask for such outrageous sums because the alternative is worse in the current climate. Of course there is a caveat - if they ever become obsolete they will be dropped quickly due to their leveraging. Things can be very fickle especially with advances that can metaphorically turn weaving from an apprentice-journeyman-master trade to a factory job worked by illiterate women and children.
• srkmno 8y ago
  Never really understood why Google running a search engine in China is controversial, it wouldn't be the first US company doing business there, nor the first to censor due to local laws (Apple censors their app store etc) and it's not like tiananmen square queries will be the bulk of their traffic.
  • shanghaiaway 8y ago
    It's controversial because Google made such a big deal of not running a search engine in China, and built their corporate brand on top of that conviction.
    • srkmno 8y ago
      I don't think that's it, it's not just about pointing out hypocrisy or anything vapid like that, Congresspeople were grandstanding against the move. It's all just out of proportion somehow.
  • russdpale 8y ago
    I don't know how old you are, but google blossomed under the guise of "do no evil", that is why its controversial.
    • saulrh 8y ago
      Moral of the story: never try to be a good guy, because you'll be held to a higher standard than anyone else and crucified while your competitors, who never claimed to be anything other than malignant stains on humanity, fly under the radar and laugh. How disappointing.
      • zelon88 8y ago
        What about; be good in the beginning and then stay good even when you don't have to anymore?
        • 8y ago
• burtonator 8y ago
  These ethical dilemmas are really confusing for me. One one had I don't want to be part of this type of behavior but it's just going to give China the opportunity to fund a Google competitor to do it for them... I think it's lose/lose for Google.
  • abc-xyz 8y ago
    It really shouldn't be a dilemma unless you're morally bankrupt. Would you sell a gun to a Neo-Nazi that you knew intended to use it to murder innocent people? After all if you refused (and continued to do nothing to stop him) then he would just buy from your competitor.
    • kmlx 8y ago
      Well, considering the fact that America as a whole is morally bankrupt (by imprisoning reporters, black and brown people, and concentration camps full of kids), I’d say the attack against Google is a coordinated manoeuvre.
    • sir_bearington 8y ago
      The fact that you compare China with fascism is it's own can of worms, but even your comparison with selling armaments falls short. China already has search engines, Google wants to sell them a better one. Sure, it'll be censored but there's nothing to indicate Google China would be any more or less censored than Baidu. How does a China with Google become any more dangerous than a China without Google? I suppose better search engines make the country's labor force slightly more productive, which in turn means more tax revenue, some of which may be spent on the military. But if you really subscribe to such a belief, you should boycott all Chinese goods - and I'm going to go out on a limb and doubt you're going to do that.
      • abc-xyz 8y ago
        Fine, the Neo-Nazi already has a pistol but you want to sell him an AK-47. Sure, it'll be used to murder innocent people, but there's nothing to indicate he would have kill more with your gun than the gun he already has. Google is technologically superior to Baidu, and well, basically every company in the world. Less people using VPN = more people exposed. Superior tech = can imprison/murder more innocent people. More companies and governments supporting China with tech + billions = they'll become evermore powerful and continue to do great evil. Google becoming financially dependent on China will give their government more leverage to force Google to share data and add backdoors to their other applications, and they'd be more likely to help build other tools that will help their government build a dystopian surveillance state. Do I boycutt all Chinese goods? No, but I do avoid everything "Made in China" whenever it's possible (e.g. clothing, DSLR camera, etc.), and I try to discourage other people and companies from doing business with China, as well as protect their online privacy.
• burtonator 8y ago
  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 deal was at least $350k per year but we never got down to final negotiation. They wanted a LOT of data and also custom support and engineering. It could have easily hit $1M which is a lot of money and would have been a significant percentage of our revenue. About a month into conversations the questions became a bit disturbing. It was clear to me that they were interested in tracking ethic minorities and trying to track down their physical location. ... you can read between the lines in the RFP. After finding out what happened to Khashoggi I'm VERY happy about my decision. They were using this technology to harass him on social media and I'm sure are and were tracking other people.
  • wpietri 8y ago
    Very interesting. Do you know who eventually built is for them?
  • lawnchair_larry 8y ago
    Sounds similar to what Moxie experienced: https://moxie.org/blog/saudi-surveillance/ https://moxie.org/blog/saudi-surveillance/
    • eitland 8y ago
      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
      • chippy 8y ago
        Does this mean WhatsApp is okay to use now?
• honkycat 8y ago
  This was so dumb, such bad optics for Google, who up until this came out I was mostly ambivalent about. Might have even considered working for them.
• ineedasername 8y ago
  Title seems wrong, it sounds like Dragonfly is still undergoing active development, just with reduced data access (no more access to 265.com search data) but the article references ongoing development, even though some developers were removed. That doesn't sound like it's actually ended. And the title's quote of "Effectively Ended" seems only to be quoting itself, there's no one in the article the said those words. Pichai's words to congress could easily be read to mean "we don't have a release date at this time" not that it wasn't still an active project.
  • erikb 8y ago
    The political battle against Pichai made a success. So now the public support can be tuned down and Google can move on to do the only thing they could do in their current situation: building tools for the chinese gov to enter the market. They'll probably do the same thing behind closed doors and without the public Google label on the final result. Maybe baidu will suddenly provide better search results or something. That's how this world works, and it's not like they really have a choice in that matter.
    • ineedasername 8y ago
      I think Google does have choice, they could forego revenue when it's knowingly generated by efforts to censor and oppress people. "how this world works" absolutely includes people & companies that betray their ideals for money, but there are those that stick to their principals too [0],[1] [0] https://moxie.org/blog/saudi-surveillance/ https://moxie.org/blog/saudi-surveillance/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18292327 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18292327
• romeisendcoming 8y ago
  Google: selectively good for goodness sake.
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• Lazare 8y ago
  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 career, but I can't recall ever making a mistake that got my boss called in to testify before Congress, or that got my company prptested by Amnesty International, or that got hundreds of my colleagues to sign a letter of protest! Managing to do all of those at once is...well, honestly it's sort of impressive, but is raises questions. If The Intercept is just completely wrong, I'd expect to see a categorical denial; after all it would make Google look a lot better if they can convincingly demonstrate that all of this didn't actually happen. If The Intercept is right, I'd expect to see Beaumont fired; that's what happens when people violate internal rules and cause significant damage to their employer as a result. Since we've seen neither...I guess the logical assumption is that The Intercept was right about what Beaumont was doing, but he...wasn't rogue? That official Google policy was to subvert official Google policy, and hide things from the internal teams charged with stopping that exact thing? Like...is the CEO really having meetings with the privacy team and telling them to be extra vigilant not to let product teams misuse personal data, and then later that afternoon meeting with Beaumont and telling him to be extra careful not to let the privacy team find out that he's misusing personal data to develop a product? What a bizarre situation.
  • julienreszka 8y ago
    Google is large enough to not be a monolith culture have you considered this
    • pimmen 8y ago
      Then I would expect them to fire Beaumont to at least keep some control over the culture. You can't tell the shareholders "we're too big to know what the hell we're doing, we might be throwing billions of dollars on a project with absolutely no commercial value because it's some executive's pet project all the while the C-level management, the board and the shareholders would be none the wiser. We're a sure thing, by the way, invest in us!" That's what you're saying as a CEO when you're letting rogue executives do projects that bypasses company guidelines, deceives other managers and costs boat loads in resources and PR without any sort of consequences. Or, you're totally fine with what he did because it's a silent approval if you're a manager and you let unethical behavior go unpunished. Nobody told Mr. Pichai being in charge was going to be easy.
• alextooter 8y ago
  Too bad for me. I want use Google search in China,even it is not prefect.
• known 8y ago
  Blocked in China: - Google search - Facebook - YouTube - Wikipedia (Chinese) - Twitter - Netflix - Instagram - Tumblr - WhatsApp - BBC - New York Times - Bloomberg - Reuters - WSJ - TIME - The Economist Not blocked: - Amazon - Ebay - Yahoo - LinkedIn - Bing - Apple - MSN https://twitter.com/spectatorindex/status/1020517726400344064 https://twitter.com/spectatorindex/status/102051772640034406...
• strooper 8y ago
  On another note, 265.com, a Google subsidiary in China, has no SSL certificate set for the domain, making the site access effectively http only.
• natch 8y ago
  My guess is they will just switch to doing a pilot project in another country, just as repressive, but somewhere where the abuse of power is relatively speaking more under the radar for most people than China. Myanmar, for example, or Vietnam. This way they can achieve the research goals of learning how to operate in such an environment, while pretending to have stopped.
  • SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    Or the US?
    • natch 8y ago
      Sadly yes.
• randaouser 8y ago
  I started working on fuzzy matching searchable encryption for this very reason; you can send an encrypted search term and match using jaccard similarity to an encrypted index of similar documents without information leakage of the search query or the encrypted document. This is the state of the art at the moment and would be useful for such things as: 1)Private search over encrypted documents 2)getting your FICO score like equifax without leaking any information 3)finding genetic treatments for conditions you are predisposed to without revealing your private genetic makeup or a pharmaceutical companies patented gene therapy sequence Typically retrieval of the document would require a TOR like network. Ill post a link to my work in the near future. Msg me if you're interested.
  • raincom 8y ago
    is it related to homomorphic encryption?
    • randaouser 8y ago
      I imagine a decentralized search service for a particular set of search queries that users want privacy against. it leverages Additive and Multiplicative Homomorphic Encryption with Elliptic Curves. I wanted a fuzzy searching algorithm so went with a minhash implementation on document bigram vectors which were then converted to a locality sensitive hash. Unfortunately, it is an interactive protocol unlike something like zksnark/starks :( I have written it in Javascript and plan to deploy it as a plugin in Brave Browser. Sundar really disappointed me recently with his rhetoric; he claims googles pursuit for information accessibility but also want to censor and allow authoritarian governments to profile users. This would also allow location services without revealing your location
  • teritoh 8y ago
    https://youtu.be/pzb96FblhLg https://youtu.be/pzb96FblhLg
• pdm55 8y ago
  I don't understand. I used Microsft's Bing when I was living in China. It was very obviously censored. Just type in a "rude" word and you get a message that the search results were blocked. Part of the fun was seeing what risque slang wasn't recognised and, therefore, blocked. So what compromises are Microsoft prepared to make, but Google isn't?
• est 8y ago
  Dragonfly is the only project that carries empirical study of exactly which keyword triggers the GFW, at a large scale. This could be useful in business like suggest what kind of Ad content are "safe" for the Chinese market, automatically. Also one can harvest blocklist, there can be some very interesting new discoveries, useful intels can be made into updates and alerts. Google can not disclosure this strategy publicly because the Chinese might masquerade the firewall's behavior accordingly. Traveling into darkness can be used to fight against darkness. I feel sorry for the engineers.
• alekhkhanna 8y ago
  Read "Google's Secret Santa Project".
• jiveturkey 8y ago
  this isn’t over, not by a long shot. if this company is still being pulled along (i hesitate to say led) by the CFO, and i believe it is, then this will have lasting repercussions. the spark of revolution has been quelled and the peasants have been appeased. but their hand has been shown and they have but one card to play. ok sorry for the poor job at evocative rhetoric. basically, from this point and for the next 5 years the culture will be changed by subtle, barely perceptible nudges. at the end, the engineers will be left without any real voice and any uprising will by met with backlash from their peers, not their betters. then, google will be able to explore china and similar markets. or perhaps, much like many tech companies license their IP from an IE subsidiary, the core tech will be licensed to a subsidiary that isn’t constrained by western morals.
• glenrivard 8y ago
  Is interesting that Microsoft has a censored search engine in China and people do not say much about it. But worse is they have censored search in the US for Chinese speaking people apparently. "Bing censoring Chinese language search results for users in the US" https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/11/bing-censors-chinese-language-search-results https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/11/bing-cens...
• then 8y ago
  (internal) firewall duh http://www.thegoldwater.com/news/43624-Fire-Rages-at-Google-Offices-in-Beijing http://www.thegoldwater.com/news/43624-Fire-Rages-at-Google-...