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.

 

[mindlessobserver]

I fear a world where a tech giant like amazon or google are the ones to trigger the singularity. Genuine, cold beads of sweat, fear. I'm not sure there's anyone I would trust were they to achieve it, but by god having one of these tech monopolies who are determined to '''help''' us achieving it first would be close to the worst case scenario.

A true AI will be a child, and the product of its "parents". I wonder what an AI designed by a tech company that wants to "save the world from itself" using any and all means necessary while at the same time also get stinking rich doing it would be like. I can't think of anything good.

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.

Our Constitution does need some new amendments for sure. The contortions our courts have had to go through to make a document written in the 18th and 19th centuries apply to things like the internet, chemical contraception etc, has been an issue for some time now. Personally at the top of my list is an amendment codifying unrestricted access to the internet, and an amendment that makes it a right to petition the courts for redress. The latter one is to nuke mandatory out of court arbitration big companies have been putting in their user agreements lately. There is nothing wrong with arbitration if both parties want to do it, but forcing one side into it by agreement is sheisty.

 

[uncleShitHeel]

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

Can we then simply invade China?

 

[kcbbq]

If you spend 10 years developing a sweet program, put it out to market, and then the chinks copy it and sell it for 50% of the price without having to do a single minute of development work, how are you ahead of the competition?

Through magical fairy dust made up of ground up Blackberrys and Tucker cars.

 

[repentance]

Call me a cynic/autist but what is the likelihood now of these rebels being "exposed" as part of an alt-right nazi gamer conspiracy to stop asian people using the internet or something by our heroic and non partisan press?

The organisation of a strike and a strike fund by Liz Fong-Jones got positive press when it happened a couple of weeks back. The question is what happens next time.

 

[Haesindang Park]

If the United Nations truly stood for human rights, they would've criticized companies that aid authoritarian regimes. Google claims to be for freedom of self-expression since they have a lot of user-friendly features yet their employees wished they have the same level of freedom of speech as their clients.

 

[BScCollateral]

If the United Nations truly stood for human rights, they would've criticized companies that aid authoritarian regimes.

Those authoritarian regimes are the UN.

The United Nations haven't fought for human rights since it stopped being the name of the Allies in World War II.

 

[エボラちゃん]

This is nothing but a slight delay, we'll get there eventually, unless some things fundamentally change.

 

[Varg Did Nothing Wrong]

If you spend 10 years developing a single piece of software before you sell anything you've got some major problems with your business model nevermind the chinks

I guess you don't have an answer for me except nitpicking random numbers I'm using for purposes of hyperbole.

OK.

 

[mindlessobserver]

If the United Nations truly stood for human rights, they would've criticized companies that aid authoritarian regimes. Google claims to be for freedom of self-expression since they have a lot of user-friendly features yet their employees wished they have the same level of freedom of speech as their clients.

Our comfy and free societies are the exception rather then the rule when it comes to the nations of the world. There are 193 members of the UN, and only about 40 of those members could be considered non-shithole countries.

 

[uncleShitHeel]

All the people realizing how shitty Google is...is it finally Bing’s time to shine?

C'mon bing is solid search engine for porn.

 

[Marvin]

"Don't be evil", am I right?

They got rid of that motto a few years ago.

 

[chadmuska]

lol get fucked China

Spoiler

动态网自由门 天安門 天安门 法輪功 李洪志 Free Tibet 六四天安門事件 The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 天安門大屠殺 The Tiananmen Square Massacre 反右派鬥爭 The Anti-Rightist Struggle 大躍進政策 The Great Leap Forward 文化大革命 The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution 人權 Human Rights 民運 Democratization 自由 Freedom 獨立 Independence 多黨制 Multi-party system 台灣 臺灣 Taiwan Formosa 中華民國 Republic of China 西藏 土伯特 唐古特 Tibet 達賴喇嘛 Dalai Lama 法輪功 Falun Dafa 新疆維吾爾自治區 The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region 諾貝爾和平獎 Nobel Peace Prize 劉暁波 Liu Xiaobo 民主 言論 思想 反共 反革命 抗議 運動 騷亂 暴亂 騷擾 擾亂 抗暴 平反 維權 示威游行 李洪志 法輪大法 大法弟子 強制斷種 強制堕胎 民族淨化 人體實驗 肅清 胡耀邦 趙紫陽 魏京生 王丹 還政於民 和平演變 激流中國 北京之春 大紀元時報 九評論共産黨 獨裁 專制 壓制 統一 監視 鎮壓 迫害 侵略 掠奪 破壞 拷問 屠殺 活摘器官 誘拐 買賣人口 遊進 走私 毒品 賣淫 春畫 賭博 六合彩 天安門 天安门 法輪功 李洪志 Free Tibet 劉曉波动态网自由门

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

They got rid of that motto a few years ago.

And people refused to see that as a bad sign. "Oh well maybe sometimes evil is good right?"

 

[Ledian]

The establishment left and Silicon Valley in particular went full on into crazytown because they realized that the average person thinks they're fucking insane and has no interest in their shithead identity politics horse-shit. They can't win in any field but a situation they have absolutely, complete, 100% control over, and they fucking know it.

Fact is, they're simply a bigger version of what happens when the religion of intersectionality takes over a community - it gets ruled by a bunch of fucking sociopaths who only maintain the power they do because they have admin privileges and the community does not. Like I've always said - they've never been numerous and they've never had anything even close to a majority, meaning any claim to having a mandate they may have is entirely a fucking work of fiction. They know who would completely dominate the discourse on every single fucking site if it weren't for their site-wide dictators: Us.

This is why they shut down comments and ratings on any video they post, because the Internet has spoken, and it's told them to fuck off.
Youtube Rewind 2018 gives you a perfect fucking microcosm of this.

A side-effect of this is that they hate the average person. They legit believe people are too stupid to be allowed to make their own decisions.
Which is why they swore to fight populism starting in 2016.

The good news: Their fucking Utopian visions mean fuck all to the average person. And the harder they push, the more they push people into awareness. Their only win condition from this point onwards is strategic deplatforming, to prevent their opposition from getting a word in edgewise, but fact is the significant majority of people do not use Social Media at all, so they've been forced to try to use every trick at their disposal to strangle out any voice that can go against them, which, paradoxically, only leads more to realize what's going on.

It should be noted that these very people trying to copy China's system to try and fight this are playing on false hopes. Unpersoning people in China is obviously a very good way for the Chinese government to silence any and all opponents because they have no way to get out of something like that.
The companies and the people who work for them as well as social media banshees who love to deplatform and silence their opposition don't know that doing the very same thing here will not hold the same result. All it does is hide their opinions. It does nothing to the person saying them.

Another thing is that the reason China's government gets away with things like social credits and their great firewall and why it's something that would be a literal uphill battle here, is a little something called the Cultural Revolution which basically turned the Chinese from people with needs into nothing more than puppets of the state in a massive campaign to erase the past. With nothing to hold onto, what can dissenters do to sway the populace? To the people of China, their oppressive government is the norm thanks to everything they've done from that point on. And it makes it easy for them to justify doing oppressive bullshit when most modern Chinese only know the state is before the person and that freedom is determined by said state.
In comparison, the US and the West are built on Enlightenment ideals; especially America itself. Freedom of the man, freedom of the idea, freedom of expression, and freedom of religion. Trying to stifle voices will anger people easily because of this.
The average American doesn't want their speech limited just because "feels before reals", because we all grew up with the idea we can say what we want, wherever we want. The only thing that limits that is what consequences shall arrive for saying certain things; an excellent deterrent in itself. No need for more laws than those that exist for assault to help with getting your ass kicked for saying something inflammatory.

Their fight against populism will be a forever losing one unless they can start erasing the very foundation of Western society and we all know that is hardly an easy thing to do. They can erase or change articles on Wikipedia, publish newsletter after newsletter debasing the old ideals, scream and shout at protests and rallies against "hate speech", "Nazis", "alt-right", and "white men", and try to play up identity politics and social justice to try and smother out those ideals but in truth it's not working. It only gives people more a reason to fight back and speak up more. It's only proving that those very ideals are exactly what we need in this day and age.

 

[Poiseon]

Can we then simply invade China?

It wouldn't be as difficult as one might think. The American Navy has enough firepower to eliminate Chinese military installations in the Pacific with relative ease. The only real threat is long range missile systems which could destroy our bases on Guam and any ships within range of the coast. That's where our submarines come in. Our subs are the best in the world (Jarrod proves it.) and compared to the Chinese' loud, clunky submarines, it's no contest. After that US Subs would pepper military bases near the coast with missiles, soon after the destruction of the Chinese Navy by submarine warfare. Once those land-based missile platforms are destroyed the American Navy can act with impunity. A land-based invasion would be extremely bloody, and while the American military would likely win, it would be World War II level casualties. The Chinese civilians suffering the most. It would be better to blockade China and cut off trade entirely. 70% of Chinese goods travel through the seas. Starve out the economic, maybe even arm the Muslims in the east they are brutalizing for a rebellion.

 

[mindlessobserver]

And people refused to see that as a bad sign. "Oh well maybe sometimes evil is good right?"

Well yeah, why wouldn't you want to be evil if you had the power over the worlds information and billions of dollars.

 

[Slap47]

Some of you Californians are alright.

It wouldn't be as difficult as one might think. The American Navy has enough firepower to eliminate Chinese military installations in the Pacific with relative ease. The only real threat is long range missile systems which could destroy our bases on Guam and any ships within range of the coast. That's where our submarines come in. Our subs are the best in the world (Jarrod proves it.) and compared to the Chinese' loud, clunky submarines, it's no contest. After that US Subs would pepper military bases near the coast with missiles, soon after the destruction of the Chinese Navy by submarine warfare. Once those land-based missile platforms are destroyed the American Navy can act with impunity. A land-based invasion would be extremely bloody, and while the American military would likely win, it would be World War II level casualties. The Chinese civilians suffering the most. It would be better to blockade China and cut off trade entirely. 70% of Chinese goods travel through the seas. Starve out the economic, maybe even arm the Muslims in the east they are brutalizing for a rebellion.

The USA would annihilate China with minimal losses. The reason the US doesn't do this is because they view themselves as civilized.

 

[Harbinger of Kali Yuga]

Their fight against populism will be a forever losing one unless they can start erasing the very foundation of Western society and we all know that is hardly an easy thing to do. They can erase or change articles on Wikipedia, publish newsletter after newsletter debasing the old ideals, scream and shout at protests and rallies against "hate speech", "Nazis", "alt-right", and "white men", and try to play up identity politics and social justice to try and smother out those ideals but in truth it's not working. It only gives people more a reason to fight back and speak up more. It's only proving that those very ideals are exactly what we need in this day and age.

I'm not sure I agree. They very clearly are winning. The discussions we're having today are drastically different (in a much worse way) than we were having 8 years ago. They very fact that these people exist now in frightingly large numbers is a very bad sign. Furthermore, this shit is coming from the media, the supposed "counter-culture," teachers, the intellectual gurus, etc. Even Bernie Sanders's popularity and Occasio-Cortez getting elected is a sign of this, the socialism stuff is pretty entwined with social justice.

The only reason Google employees opposed the censorship thing was that Google leadership forgot to couch this in social justice terms. Maybe there's a few old schoolers there with grimy beards that pre-pend "GNU" in front of "Linux" but like the ACLU is becoming, the "free speech" fighters only believe in free speech in a very loose way the resembles what we understand the term by.

 

[Vlad the Inhaler]

It wouldn't be as difficult as one might think. The American Navy has enough firepower to eliminate Chinese military installations in the Pacific with relative ease. The only real threat is long range missile systems which could destroy our bases on Guam and any ships within range of the coast. That's where our submarines come in. Our subs are the best in the world (Jarrod proves it.) and compared to the Chinese' loud, clunky submarines, it's no contest. After that US Subs would pepper military bases near the coast with missiles, soon after the destruction of the Chinese Navy by submarine warfare. Once those land-based missile platforms are destroyed the American Navy can act with impunity. A land-based invasion would be extremely bloody, and while the American military would likely win, it would be World War II level casualties. The Chinese civilians suffering the most. It would be better to blockade China and cut off trade entirely. 70% of Chinese goods travel through the seas. Starve out the economic, maybe even arm the Muslims in the east they are brutalizing for a rebellion.

I'm sorry. On what plane of reality, using what hallucinatory substances, is starting a war with China an even remotely plausible idea. Your idea is what, exactly? A massive first strike with hundreds of nuclear weapons in the hope we can neutralize their entire nuclear arsenal? Let's set aside for just a moment the fact that 1960's technology nuclear weapon armed submarines (no matter how fucking loud) and mobile launchers make that idea beyond our or anybody else's capability. Aside from the complete insanity and unspeakable immorality of such a move, how long do you think it would take for every other nuclear power to annihilate us as an unaccepatable threat to the rest of the world? How many dozens of thermonuclear weapons that survive our first strike would be acceptable loss? Not to mention the nuclear fallout and complete collapse of our economy in the wake of all that. Terrorists knocked down two buildings and our economy freaked. How about having San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, DC, New York, Boston, Atlanta, Miami and Dallas (for starters) incinerated?

But we could just blockade their trade, eh? You do realize a naval blockade is an act of war, and they have more than the military capability to end such a blockade, and full justification for doing so. Okay, so we'll just start a trade war with the foreign country that happens to hold the largest share of our debt held by foreign countries. Do I need to explain why that is completely moronic? How they can hurt us FAR worse than we can hurt them? That there is a difference between a recession and a depression, and which one they can inflict on us?

And all why? Because they want Google to help them restrict what their citizens can search for online? I'm sure this is going to go over like a turd in a punchbowl, but China is a sovereign nation. They are also a communist country, and neither they, nor their government has any great interest in changing that. And who the fuck are we to tell them what they should or shouldn't do? Do you know anything about their history of the last 100 years or so? Do you know how many Chinese died during the Boxer Rebellion? How foreign powers completely controlled her? How they spent 40 years being brutalized by warlords, the Japanese, the Kuomintang, and then their civil war all before Mao and his communists showed up and taught them what real suffering meant? The Chinese are fucking terrifying just because of what they can take and still keep going, getting stronger. They are perfectly willing to leave us the fuck alone if we leave them. Only a fool thinks we have any realistic choice but to gladly accept their offer.

 

[Poiseon]

I'm sorry. On what plane of reality, using what hallucinatory substances, is starting a war with China an even remotely plausible idea. Your idea is what, exactly? A massive first strike with hundreds of nuclear weapons in the hope we can neutralize their entire nuclear arsenal? Let's set aside for just a moment the fact that 1960's technology nuclear weapon armed submarines (no matter how fucking loud) and mobile launchers make that idea beyond our or anybody else's capability. Aside from the complete insanity and unspeakable immorality of such a move, how long do you think it would take for every other nuclear power to annihilate us as an unaccepatable threat to the rest of the world? How many dozens of thermonuclear weapons that survive our first strike would be acceptable loss? Not to mention the nuclear fallout and complete collapse of our economy in the wake of all that. Terrorists knocked down two buildings and our economy freaked. How about having San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, DC, New York, Boston, Atlanta, Miami and Dallas (for starters) incinerated?

But we could just blockade their trade, eh? You do realize a naval blockade is an act of war, and they have more than the military capability to end such a blockade, and full justification for doing so. Okay, so we'll just start a trade war with the foreign country that happens to hold the largest share of our debt held by foreign countries. Do I need to explain why that is completely moronic? How they can hurt us FAR worse than we can hurt them? That there is a difference between a recession and a depression, and which one they can inflict on us?

And all why? Because they want Google to help them restrict what their citizens can search for online? I'm sure this is going to go over like a turd in a punchbowl, but China is a sovereign nation. They are also a communist country, and neither they, nor their government has any great interest in changing that. And who the fuck are we to tell them what they should or shouldn't do? Do you know anything about their history of the last 100 years or so? Do you know how many Chinese died during the Boxer Rebellion? How foreign powers completely controlled her? How they spent 40 years being brutalized by warlords, the Japanese, the Kuomintang, and then their civil war all before Mao and his communists showed up and taught them what real suffering meant? The Chinese are fucking terrifying just because of what they can take and still keep going, getting stronger. They are perfectly willing to leave us the fuck alone if we leave them. Only a fool thinks we have any realistic choice but to gladly accept their offer.

I wasn't saying we should invade China. Nor was I saying we should use nukes. You do realize not all submarines carry nuclear weapons, right? They use normal missiles like most naval units. They are powered by reactors. I suggest you do research before stating which country could hurt which worse.

You sperging the fuck out about Chinese history and warlords and how they've suffered just so much uwu.

They are little more than sheeple, and if you think for even a second that these people who will be forced into a social credit system would fight for their government in an invasion, you are a fool.
Read what I was replying to before throwing a bitch fit, please.