Cracking a Tough Nut

March 19, 2010

Four hundred million is a tempting target. That’s how many people are on-line in China—a hundred million more than America’s population.

It looks like Google is pulling out of the Chinese market and its rival, Baidu (with 63% of the market), will win this round. But the fight isn’t over.  Microsoft may be the next contender to go toe to toe with Baidu. It has been reported that Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, which has less than 1 percent of the Chinese market, is moving quickly to use Google’s departure to its advantage.

Google’s reason for pulling out of China was a recent cyber attack. Well, why isn’t Baidu complaining? After all, a hacker group called the “Iranian Cyber Army” took over Baidu for four hours in January 2010. Baidu should claim Google was behind that attack.

See Google Recycled http://wp.me/pN4pY-2r

 


Shadow Land

February 21, 2010

It seems that students in China may be modeling themselves after a Jackie Chan movie and playing catch-me if you can.  Harking back to a piece I wrote about Google being hacked, more evidence has been revealed that the real perpetrators may be high school students.

Now, the New York Times says, “the attacks came from China but not necessarily from the Chinese government, or even from Chinese sources.”

The NSA traced some of the attacks to servers in Taiwan.  Then a United States military contractor that faced the same attacks as Google has also led investigators to suspect a link to a specific computer science class, taught by a Ukrainian professor at a vocational school in east China’s Shandong Province. Last week, in another hacking incident, the trail led through China to Germany where that other attack originated.

What is most disturbing is the knee jerk reaction that took place when shortly after Google went public with its accusations against China without evidence, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton challenged the Chinese in a speech on Internet censors, suggesting China’s efforts to control open access to the Internet were in effect an information-age Berlin Wall.

This is not the way to build trust with other governments. The wise thing to do would have been to wait until all the evidence was in before deciding who was guilty. It’s also interesting to know that this vocational school is operated by a company with close ties to Baidu, the dominant search engine in China and Google’s competitor.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Google Recycled

February 5, 2010

The Western media buzzed about Google being hacked and censored by China. Google threatened to leave China if this didn’t stop.  Obama and Secretary of State Clinton demanded that China fess up.

What’s going on?  It isn’t as if Google is the primary search engine in China. In fact, this claim that they are being hacked by the Chinese may be their way to get out of China without the red face of failure. The truth is that the Chinese haven’t taken to Google like the rest of the world.

After all, “Just like Chinese search engine Baidu trumped Google, online bookseller Dangdang outsmarted Amazon in China with better merchandising skills while Alibaba-owned Chinese auction site Taobao took the lead from eBay ( EBAY – news – people ) by giving sellers a free listing of their goods and charging only for premium accounts.”  source: Alibaba.com News

As I wrote in Honor, Chinese Style, it’s obvious that the Chinese prefer things done the Chinese way and the word is out on the streets in China. The Chinese prefer Baidu over Google.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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