China tries to contain damage from Google dispute
search results. “We are optimists,” Google spokesman Scott Rubin said Thursday. Beijing requires Internet traffic to pass through government-controlled gateways that block access to material deemed subversive or pornographic.
Google’s China-based site excludes from its results any foreign Web sites to which access is blocked.
If a compromise is not worked out within the next few weeks, the company intends to shut down Google.cn and pull out of China. Rubin said Google has not set a deadline for breaking the impasse. Google has been in touch with the Chinese government to alert officials about its plans, but Rubin didn’t know whether the two sides have scheduled additional meetings yet.
Images from the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy protests cropped up in Google.cn’s search results Thursday, leading some Web surfers to conclude Google had begun to defy censorship rules. Rubin said, however, that Google.cn is still censoring its results to comply with China’s law and protect its employees there.
Google is prepared to abandon the Internet’s biggest market because of computer-hacking attacks that pried into the e-mail accounts of human-rights activists protesting the Chinese government’s policies. The assault also hit at least twenty other publicly traded companies, according to Google. IDefense, the security arm of VeriSign Inc., issued a report saying the attacks hit at least thirty-four companies, including Google.
In a separate report Thursday, computer security experts McAfee Inc. said its investigation determined the hackers exploited a flaw in Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer browser. Microsoft confirmed the weakness in a Thursday advisory and said the security hole can be closed by setting the Internet zone security to “high.” The company did not immediately issue a software fix, though.
Google traced the attacks on its computers to hackers in China, but so far has not directly tied the chicanery to the Chinese government or its agents. IDefense says its anonymous sources in the intelligence- and defense-contracting industries have determined the attacks originated from “a single foreign entity consisting either of agents of the Chinese state or proxies thereof.”
The White House applauded Google for confronting China about its censorship after discovering the hacks. “The United States has frequently made clear to the Chinese our views on the importance of unrestricted Internet use, as well as cybersecurity,” White House spokesman Nick Shapiro said. “We continue (to) look to the Chinese for an explanation.”
The State Department tried to get some answers Thursday. David Shear, a deputy assistant secretary of state who deals with China, met over lunch with a high-ranking representative of China’s U.S. embassy. The Chinese ambassador to the United States is likely to be summoned to the State Department in the coming days, agency officials said.
One of the human-rights activists whose e-mail was hacked said she was notified of the intrusion on her account in a 7 January call from David Drummond, Google’s top lawyer. Tenzin Seldon, a Tibetan rights activist and sophomore at Stanford University, said she allowed her laptop to be inspected by Google’s security experts, who found no viruses on the machine. Seldon, 20, has a new Gmail password and a new hope for free speech in China now that Google is taking a stand against the Chinese government.
