【10.01.13 英国卫报】Google sends a shockwave through Chinese internet

青蛙小王子

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jan/13/google-china-internet-shockwave

For years, security experts in the US and Europe have known that Chinese hackers sanctioned by its government have been probing the computer systems of important organisations – whether aerospace companies, science laboratories or the British parliament, which was targeted at the end of 2005. Now Google has discovered that it, too, is among the targets of those attacks.

The internet giant has declared cyberwar on the world's biggest nation. Who would be brave enough to take on more than a billion people? But the method it has chosen is to flood them with the resource that is so plentiful: the world's information.

It is a resource that China's population is hungrier than ever to get. News of tainted milk scandals, cover-ups over shoddy buildings that collapse in earthquakes, riots in Tibet … humans are infovores, always keen – once they have raised themselves beyond subsistence – to know more and more about the world around them.

Google is saying to China's government: we have played by your rules, we censored content as you demanded, but you didn't honour your side of the bargain – you let the people who work for you attack us. Therefore we will attack you in the way that is guaranteed to undermine you: by removing censorship. The truth – or at least "unapproved" opinions – about the Dalai Lama and the Falun Gong will reach the populace. And that will only be the beginning.

Can China's repressive government survive that? If it thought it could, it wouldn't block it in the first place. So the next step in the war will be that China's government will respond by kicking Google out of China. Then the war will go internal. China's millions of web surfers – more than there are in the US – are sure to notice the absence of google.cn, sure to ask, sure to enquire. The seeds of doubt will be planted.
It would be easy (but almost certainly hopelessly optimistic) to think that by those actions, internet censorship will end in China. The reality is that Google is only a minority player there (with about 12% of the search market, compared to the in-country Baidu.com with 77%). Yet it will make a difference.

Google has stood up to the most extreme form of cyberbullying and said: no more. This matters more because it is putting western companies and governments on notice that it is now OK to say China is a bad neighbour on the internet. Besides tolerating commercial espionage via hacking, it also allows the hosting of thousands of sites that help spammers rip people off around the world. It allows the theft of intellectual property (the complaint of Cybersitter being only the most recent). It may lead to a new maturity. China's government has been put on notice that it cannot do as it likes.

It would be nice to think that the outcome might be like that imagined in 1975 by the British science fiction writer John Brunner, whose book The Shockwave Rider predated the internet but imagined it beautifully. The denouement of the book comes when a hacker writes a program that makes all information available to everyone, at once rooting out corruption, lies, misinformation and bringing down tyrants. They're sure to know the book in Mountain View. Whether it's allowed in Beijing is another matter.