【2010.7.30 WIRED】Analysis: Google Stumbles, Again, With China Outage Report

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http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/07/google-stumbles/

Google’s Chinese web-censorship monitoring page reported Thursday that its unfiltered Chinese search site had been blocked again, prompting eager news organizations, including Reuters, the Associated Press and Wired.com, to report the news widely.

Fortunately for Chinese web users, there was no such general block, as was quickly reported through Twitter. Google retracted its outage report, saying that “Because of the way we measure accessibility in China, it’s possible that our machines could overestimate the level of blockage. That seems to be what happened last night when there was a relatively small blockage.”

That’d be fine if the dashboard were reporting the general availability of, say, Google Voice.

But Google built this public page to reflect the status of the most important geopolitical issue facing what’s become the most important technology company in the world. Reporting that China had blocked uncensored search again, just weeks after successfully finagling a renewal of its operating license in China, is simply mind-boggling.

In its defense, Google says this kind of monitoring is hard to do, that it quickly rectified the error, and that it created the dashboard to be transparent with the press and public.

That’s understandable, and Google is now a sprawling, massive company with $25 billion a year in revenues, tens of thousands of employees, and more products and initiatives than most anyone can keep track of.

That said, Google has made a string of embarrassing mistakes and politically damaging moves over the past six months or so that reflect poorly on the company.

First, Google’s China offices got hacked into through a vulnerability in an employee’s use of Microsoft’s IE6, a buggy browser Google hardly even supports any more. Once in, the attackers got at source code and some info on human rights activists who use Gmail.

In a show of transparency unequaled by any company of its size, Google publicly announced the hack and the damage and pointed a finger in the general direction of the Chinese government — and then set up a showdown that’s resulted in an uncensored Chinese-language search engine becoming available to the Chinese public. That’s a fine — and unexpected — outcome, but the security hole was embarrassing.

Secondly, when Google launched its micro-publishing service Buzz, the service launched with an interface that was terribly confusing, which led users to make privacy choices they didn’t intend, including making public who they contacted most often. In the ensuing, overblown backlash, some even erroneously thought that the service had opened them up to stalkers.

In fact, the user interface design of the setup was so confusing that even the company’s former top policy official Andrew McLaughlin accidentally made his Gmail contact list public, leading to a White House investigation — and eventual rebuke — of him for using Gmail to contact former colleagues now that he’s the internet policy director for the White House.

Again, to Google’s credit, the company swiftly acknowledged its Buzz mistakes and swiftly made changes to the service — but the mistake largely came from testing the service mostly within the company, which kept it from understanding how confusing the interface actually was.

Third, Google was recently forced to admit that its roaming camera-equipped cars, which power Google Maps’ street view photos, were also recording the content of people’s internet communications over open Wi-Fi. The intent was to capture the names and locations of Wi-Fi routers — in order to aid in geolocating users, but thanks to questioning of the service, the company admitted it accidentally included code that also grabbed the full content of wireless packets and stored them in a database.

The company quickly apologized and said it had not used the data (which, most likely, wouldn’t be of much use to anyone since the cars are constantly moving and switching Wi-Fi channels). It’s given the data to government auditors around the globe (with mixed results) and has grounded the cars indefinitely.

Fourth, as Wired.com’s Noah Shachtman reported this week, Google’s independent venture capital arm invested in Recorded Future, a company looking to make predicting the future easier, which also took substantial funding from the CIA’s investment arm, In-Q-Tel.

While both venture capital funds are independent of their respective institutions and make investments as the partners see fit, it’s a rookie blunder.

The public already feels like Google knows too much about them, even if the company largely separates what it knows about a user’s searches and use of its services from how it displays ads. Add to this that Google turned to the top U.S. spy agency, the NSA, for security help after its China hack, and you’ve got the makings of a conspiracy theory. It matters little to many people’s perception that that move was done for understandable reasons, since the NSA’s defensive arm is known for its security acumen. (The NSA is divided into two main divisions, one dedicated to snooping and one to defending the nation’s classified networks).

Simply put, people trust Google with information they don’t share with anyone else in their lives, including health-related searches and gigabytes of stored e-mails. Seeing that same company connected to secretive, three-letter U.S. agencies with a history of illegal conduct is not reassuring, no matter what the reason.

In its defense, Google says much of this stuff is technically hard — including figuring out whether Google is blocked in China, due to the many layers and regionalization of the Chinese firewall. Moreover, it says it’s doing more than any other company to be transparent and admits when it makes mistakes.

There’s much to be admired in that, and Google has been a leader in being transparent about government searches and in supporting encrypted web services. Google broke the tech world’s code of omerta about how often government and law enforcement agencies request data on users, publishing a web page that shows the requests it gets globally. No other major web service company — not Microsoft or Yahoo — nor any major ISP — not Comcast or Verizon — has done that before. And to those companies’ shame, they still won’t make the data public.

Google is also the only major online e-mail service that turns on HTTPS by default, sparing users from snooping in cafes or workplaces. It is the first — and only — major search site to enable HTTPS searches as well. Google’s also the only company to go toe-to-toe with the Chinese government over censorship and win — no small feat.

But its recent blunders simply look amateur. Perhaps they are unavoidable with a company as large and as varied as Google has become, but from here, they look more like the errors typically made by a startup, not a global and trusted behemoth.

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gabirella

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