Google, China trade shots

Google and the Chinese government are continuing to trade shots in the PR battle over net censorship. Earlier in the week, Google moved its Chinese search facility to Hong Kong where it claims it is legal under Chinese law to provide searches without censoring results. In China: The Chinese government slashed Google in an op-ed piece in China Daily. The op ed, under the name of Ding Yifan, included the assertion: ...

March 25, 2010 · 2 min · 300 words · Omid Farhang

Google-in-China saga: another hack, move to HK

There is a risk to computer security from governments. Regulatory changes, even if they are very positive measures, can impose huge demands on an enterprise (i.e. HIPPA, Sarbanes-Oxley, California’s law requiring notification of customers whose personal information is hacked on company sites.) The “government” risk can get no bigger than the clash of Google and the government of China over the censorship issue. The world suspects that the Chinese government or its proxies were behind a campaign of hacking against Google and other major U.S companies several months ago. Google reacted to the hacks by saying in January that it would stop censoring search results for web users in China. Monday it said it would move to Hong Kong. ...

March 25, 2010 · 5 min · 914 words · Omid Farhang

Google… made in China?!?

Today at CanSecWest I stopped by the Google booth and picked up a yo-yo. As I was about to open the package, something struck me: ‘Google… Made in China’ Oooops…….

March 25, 2010 · 1 min · 30 words · Omid Farhang

Google quits censoring search in China

Google’s decision to stop censoring search results in China may lead the Chinese government to block access to its sites. Google on Monday announced it has stopped censoring search results in China. The announcement came amid speculation that the search giant would pull out of China entirely and sets up a showdown with the Communist leadership there. In a 3:03 p.m. ET post on its official blog, Google said it stopped running the censored Google.cn service on Monday and was routing its Chinese users to an uncensored version of Google based in Hong Kong. ...

March 22, 2010 · 5 min · 942 words · Omid Farhang

Google posts page monitoring Chinese censorship

Google has put up a page that shows what Web services are currently being blocked by the Chinese government. http://www.google.com/prc/report.html#hl=en

March 22, 2010 · 1 min · 20 words · Omid Farhang

Google.cn is Dead Now

Google.cn is now redirecting to google.com.hk [ Hong Kong google servers ] – this has happened after the cyber attack on google china servers in december. right now if you try to access the google china web, news and image search are being redirected to google.com.hk Below is short snippet of the update about this on google official blog So earlier today we stopped censoring our search services—Google Search, Google News, and Google Images—on Google.cn. Users visiting Google.cn are now being redirected to Google.com.hk, where we are offering uncensored search in simplified Chinese, specifically designed for users in mainland China and delivered via our servers in Hong Kong. Users in Hong Kong will continue to receive their existing uncensored, traditional Chinese service, also from Google.com.hk. Due to the increased load on our Hong Kong servers and the complicated nature of these changes, users may see some slowdown in service or find some products temporarily inaccessible as we switch everything over. ...

March 22, 2010 · 1 min · 160 words · Omid Farhang

Google search reveals 3 million pages link to rogue AVs

Do you know what the latest version of Adobe’s Flash Player is? If you don’t, you may very well fall for this: Flash Player 11? There are more than 3 million pages linking to this alleged version 11: Most pages are from unsanitized forums, but there is even a Google Ad for it! Ooooops…. ...

March 22, 2010 · 2 min · 228 words · Omid Farhang

Google’s Pacific submarine cable "Unity" nearly complete

— 7.68 Terabits/s for growing Asian market — $300 million cost (from consortium of six companies) — 10,000 km length (Chikura in Japan to Los Angeles) — Increases capacity across Pacific by 20 percent — Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing technology (960Gbps per fibre-optic pair with a maximum of eight fiber pairs) — construction time: two years Story here.

March 22, 2010 · 1 min · 58 words · Omid Farhang

Google Code turns five

At age five most kids can hop, skip and tie their shoes without help. Google Code turns five this week, and while they’re still working on the shoelaces thing, they’ve grown from a simple site for hosting a couple of APIs into a destination for developers to prototype their ideas in a Code Playground, host all kinds of open source projects and find out about our growing family of APIs and products like App Engine, Google Web Toolkit and Android. ...

March 19, 2010 · 1 min · 103 words · Omid Farhang

Looking for a good time? New scheduling tool in Calendar

Scheduling meetings is tough, but rescheduling is even harder. We all know how frustrating it can be to try to find just the right time that accommodates everyone’s availability and preferred working hours. Throw in different time zones and conference rooms and it goes from painful to excruciating. We’d rather schedule dental appointments. On the Google Calendar team, they’ve noticed that when people talk about scheduling they say things like “I’m trying to find a time” or “let’s search for a new date.” They wondered what would happen if they treated calendaring more like a search problem. Just as Google search applies ranking algorithms to return the most relevant results from the web, they hoped they could rank meeting times based on criteria important to the person scheduling the meeting. ...

March 19, 2010 · 2 min · 219 words · Omid Farhang