Google forced by internal conflict to end censored Chinese search engine project

https://theintercept.com/2018/12/17/google-china-censored-search-engine-2/
https://archive.is/dSt4p

GOOGLE HAS BEEN forced to shut down a data analysis system it was using to develop a censored search engine for China after members of the company’s privacy team raised internal complaints that it had been kept secret from them, The Intercept has learned.

The internal rift over the system has had massive ramifications, effectively ending work on the censored search engine, known as Dragonfly, according to two sources familiar with the plans. The incident represents a major blow to top Google executives, including CEO Sundar Pichai, who have over the last two years made the China project one of their main priorities.

The dispute began in mid-August, when the The Intercept revealed that Google employees working on Dragonfly had been using a Beijing-based website to help develop blacklists for the censored search engine, which was designed to block out broad categories of information related to democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest, in accordance with strict rules on censorship in China that are enforced by the country’s authoritarian Communist Party government.

 

[Jaimas]

"Fear any who would deny your access to information, for in his heart of hearts, he dreams himself your master."

 

[QI 541]

Indeed I do; only a few days ago, Patreon basically told everyone on the site that it's your new parent whether you like it or not, and banned Sargon for insulting Nazis. Disturbingly, the exact same logic that they're using to justify banning him would get Christopher Hitchens banned as well; when he said that the Catholic Church's attitude to gays was "go away, you're a faggot" many years ago, he did exactly what Sargon has done.

So when Sargon and others decided to move to a new site, which incidentally also banned harrassih or inciting violence against groups, the "just move to another site" brigade of no platformers decided to smear the site to PayPal and allegedly blackmail Stripe (by threatening to release communications with their attorney) into adding a hate speech clause to its terms for the sole purpose of cutting stopping creators on the site getting money.

Thankfully, other companies (including Bitbacker, which would obviously kill many related problems) have volunteered to help fill the breach and only about one month's donations will probably be affected, and Peterson should be making a grnuige alternative, but it's worth remembering what the situation will be like if the "activists" get their way.

Anyone who one or two companies (PayPal etc) dislike (or are told are bad by the right people targeting the wrong people) would not simply be driven from one site to the next (and to think, these people used to say "you can be somewhere else, just not here") but cut off from the ability to make money from most - perhaps all - of their work online unless they unpersoned themselves and were reborn woke in a dark parody of baptism.

So yeah, it's even worse than people losing their minds in opposition, they seem to be positively begging for large payment processors to be the arbiters of who can and cannot make any money on the Internet (hence forcing people to submit to arbitrary dictates of a company) because they like what those dictates say today. And in the very short term (ie the next month or two while things are set up) they're getting exactly that.

The problem is quite simple really: Authoritarians play to win, libertarians are scrubs who complain about other people's tactics all the time. I'm going to laugh once banks start refusing service to these people.

 

[SJ 485]

if you ban your businesses from working with authoritarian regimes then you are cutting them off from more than half of all international trade

There's clearly a degree of seperation between "authoritarian regime" and the all-encompassing dystopian nightmare that is china's vision of a society governed by omnipresent surveillance, censorship and ruthless force.

 

[HumanKin]

The incident represents a major blow to top Google executives, including CEO Sundar Pichai, who have over the last two years made the China project one of their main priorities.

As soon as the US has a president that won't fellate Google they immediately jump ship to China and make censorship their priority.

 

[MadDamon]

Chinaman whining incoming. Three. Two. One.

 

[AnOminous]

if you ban your businesses from working with authoritarian regimes then you are cutting them off from more than half of all international trade

There's doing business with authoritarian regimes, such as selling them products, and they can do that with any nation we aren't actively hostile to, but there's also colluding with foreign governments to commit crimes against humanity, and that we should not allow.

 

[SJ 485]

chinas internet firewall and state controlled good boy points system are honestly pretty mild compared to what many other countries are up to

I think you fail to recognise just how effective this "good boy points system" is as a tool of control. It basically allows them to control every aspect of your life, you must talk a certain way, act a certain way, espouse certain beliefs or suddenly your entire life starts to become tangibly more difficult, every single thing you try to do is linked into this social score system. Every other authoritarian regime now or in history pales in comparison to how efficient and how truly evil this is, how it completely stamps out anything resembling what you could call the human spirit. This system is the end of freedom forever.

 

[Coconut Gun]

I just wanna make sure no Chinamen are spying on us.

June 4th Tiananmen Square Massacre Winnie The Pooh.

 

[Cinderblock]

is there really?

and the list goes on. chinas internet firewall and state controlled good boy points system are honestly pretty mild compared to what many other countries are up to.

I'm sure you can apply the Nuremberg defense to many things. But Pichai is an idiot if he thinks he can feign "just being a simple engineer team" when you are making it illegal to say "dissagreement", "air pollution", "genocide" or even worse "Winnie the Pooh"

The US and most of the world have cut ties with Venezuela. The US also has a tough stance on Russia in Europe, with Turkey in Syria and is happy to see Saudis and Iranians killing each other in Yemen.

It's not like the world doesn't know about all the mad stuff they do, and tangentially mentions them in trade negiotiations. Turkey's currency has devaluated from all the shit Erdrogan has done and so did the Ruble from sanctions. The economy in Iran is in the trash and Saudis can't even make progress in a proxy war against Sandal people that weigh 100 pounds. I don't know enough about Thailand and not many news come from there.

 

[Poiseon]

This is something that always irked me. Why are American companies allowed to violate the constitution so long as it happens overseas? Why are American food companies, United Fruit and Coca Cola in particular, known for having murderous death squads? How can Silicon Valley blatantly use slave labor? Oh and Google aiding Authoritarian regimes whenever it can.

It's all so tiresome.

Complacency. People don't give a shit about people in other countries, no one does really, most young Americans just pretend for virtue points, or, like I said, just don't care. People love to ignore atrocities as long as they are well out of view. They'd rather watch Jersey Shore, or YouTube, or Netflix. Why should they care about actual people? It's a loop humanity seems to be in.

Horrible human rights violations, mass murders, all powerful government enforcing its law ruthlessly.

People begin to tire of it, begin to resist, even fight back. Things get violent.

After a shit load of people die, a new peace reigns and the people vow to be vigilant, and never let these atrocities happen again.

New generation enjoys their freedom, prosperity, and rights. After a few generations memories fade, people become glutinous. Start wanting more.

Problems arise that they can't deal with, they give up freedom for a false sense of safety, and the process begins all over again.

 

[Wallace]

I think you fail to recognise just how effective this "good boy points system" is as a tool of control. It basically allows them to control every aspect of your life, you must talk a certain way, act a certain way, espouse certain beliefs or suddenly your entire life starts to become tangibly more difficult, every single thing you try to do is linked into this social score system. Every other authoritarian regime now or in history pales in comparison to how efficient and how truly evil this is, how it completely stamps out anything resembling what you could call the human spirit. This system is the end of freedom forever.

The answer to "quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" is precisely those who you want the least to do so.

 

[️ronic]

Just more proof that you shouldn't trust anything given to you for free.

 

[Inquisitor_BadAss]

This is something that always irked me. Why are American companies allowed to violate the constitution so long as it happens overseas? Why are American food companies, United Fruit and Coca Cola in particular, known for having murderous death squads? How can Silicon Valley blatantly use slave labor? Oh and Google aiding Authoritarian regimes whenever it can.

It's all so tiresome.

Money = Power

 

[ES 148]

No information should be under the thumb of a corporation, federation, government or religion.

I disagree, in that trade secrets are and should be a thing. Like the secret ingredients in KFC or whatever, and stuff like proprietary software. And what kind of cult is it when everyone else knows the Dark Mysteries?
Secrets are fun, is what I'm sayin'

 

[Keep Yourself Safe]

https://patreonhq.com/hate-speech-on-patreon-a9026e52c2cf

Hahahaha! I'm surprised she didn't asterisk it out when he said "W**te p**ple", so this is the hypersensitive cunt behind all this, hands trembling as she forces herself to type the BAD WORDS. Apparently saying BAD WORDS=HATE SPEECH now according to this, what a FAGGOT ass NIGGER this bitch is.

The way I see this playing out now is either that soy guzzling NIGGER Jack grows something that his whiney FAGGOT voice suggests he does not possess or they are forced into a dead end where they have to start de-platforming lots of people off their service who are a-political or who even the most fevered antifa super-soldier couldn't tar brush as being a Fascist Nazi because BAD WORDS=HATE SPEECH in Patreon Land. It's going to be a shit show!

Also to stay on-topic FUCK GOOGLE, if you ever thought that they were in anyway a moral entity or that Daddy Elon is going to take us into space! You were an idiot and I hope you open your eyes soon, corporations are not the friend of the people, they are the enemy.

 

[Get Fisted]

I disagree, in that trade secrets are and should be a thing. Like the secret ingredients in KFC or whatever, and stuff like proprietary software. And what kind of cult is it when everyone else knows the Dark Mysteries?
Secrets are fun, is what I'm sayin'

You tellin' me you wouldn't love to have that blend of secret herbs and spices at your disposal?

 

[ShroomGender]

I think you fail to recognise just how effective this "good boy points system" is as a tool of control. It basically allows them to control every aspect of your life, you must talk a certain way, act a certain way, espouse certain beliefs or suddenly your entire life starts to become tangibly more difficult, every single thing you try to do is linked into this social score system. Every other authoritarian regime now or in history pales in comparison to how efficient and how truly evil this is, how it completely stamps out anything resembling what you could call the human spirit. This system is the end of freedom forever.

Tl;DR, The Party from 1984 would masturbate over this system.

 

[Keep Yourself Safe]

You tellin' me you wouldn't love to have that blend of secret herbs and spices at your disposal?

*licks fingers*

 

[registereduser]

Tangentially-related, but if you go to China's main search engine, Baidu, and look up Tiananmen Square, you get this article:

Spoiler

Tiananmen massacre a myth
2011-07-14
Gregory Clark, a former Australian diplomat who specializes in Chinese affairs, wrote an article in Japan Times recently, saying the Western media forged the so-called Tiananmen myth. Excerpts:

The recent WikiLeaks release of cables has helped finally kill the myth of an alleged massacre in Beijing's Tiananmen Square on the night of June 3-4, 1989. But how did that myth come to exist in the first place?

Several impartial Western observers in the square at the time, including a Reuters correspondent and a Spanish TV crew, have long insisted, and written, that they saw no sign of any massacre.

So whence the story of a Tiananmen Square massacre? A lurid BBC report at the time was one important source. Other reporters may then have felt compelled to chime in even though none of them, including the BBC, had actually been in the square.

The best expose of what happened can be found in a detailed 1998 report from the Columbia University School of Journalism titled "The Myth of Tiananmen and the Price of a Passive Press". Prepared by Jay Mathews, a former Washington Post Beijing bureau chief, it notes how the Western media's pack instinct created the false massacre story.

Mathews traces much of the problem to a Hong Kong newspaper that immediately, after the 1989 disturbance, ran a long story under the name of an alleged student protester. He claimed to have been present at the square when "troops arrived with machine guns to mow down students in the hundreds".

Distributed around the globe, the article was seen as final proof that the original BBC and other massacre reports were accurate. But the alleged author of that report was never located, and for good reason: The article was almost certainly planted - one of the many black information operations.

Black propaganda was, according to an Australian researcher into the topic, Adam Henry, "the strategic placement of lies and false rumors", while gray propaganda was "the production of slanted, but not fictitious, non-attributable information".

According to Henry, it played a key role in helping justify or downplay one truly dreadful postwar massacre in Asia, namely the slaughter of up to a half a million leftwing Indonesians in 1965.

The fact is that for seven weeks the Beijing government had tolerated a student protest occupation of its iconic central square despite the disruption. Some then leaders even tried to negotiate compromises, which some of the student leaders later regretted having rejected.

When eventually troops were sent in to clear the square, the demonstrations were already ending. But by this time the Western media were there in force, keen to grab any story they could.

Ironically, the Western media, which barely noticed the massacres in certain countries, still go out of their way to paint a false picture of "a brutal Chinese government willing to march in and massacre its protesting students in the hundreds, if not thousands".

An April 17 review in this newspaper of Philip Cunningham's book, Tiananmen Moon: Inside the Chinese Student Uprising , - whose blurb on Amazon still manages to talk about a Tiananmen Square massacre - provides a clue.

It quotes one of the student leaders, Chai Ling, as having said that creating a "sea of blood" might be the only way to shake the government. If frustrated students leaving the square carried out those petrol bomb attacks on troops, then the anger of the government becomes a lot more understandable. But I doubt whether any of those responsible for the original phony story will get round to details like that.

Tiananmen remains the classic example of the shallowness and bias in most Western media reporting, and of governmental black information operations seeking to control those media. China is too important to be a victim of this nonsense.

China Daily

 

[SJ 485]

I disagree, in that trade secrets are and should be a thing. Like the secret ingredients in KFC or whatever, and stuff like proprietary software. And what kind of cult is it when everyone else knows the Dark Mysteries?
Secrets are fun, is what I'm sayin'

Proprietary software isn't necessarily even secret, software copyrights are some of the most egregious examples of the excesses of copyright law, how is it legitimate for someone to own the rights to an arrangement of data that performs a function? It's like owning the copyright to a water wheel or a windmill and having the government stop anyone other than you from building water wheels and windmills and instead only having your company build them while charging fees to the person you built it for. Fuck the whole concept of intellectual property tbh.