Walking and Talking Softly the 2nd Time Around

June 11, 2010

You may recall Google shouting in the media about being hacked and then leaving mainland China for Hong Kong after they stopped censoring content as they had agreed when they first went to China. 

Well, although the Chinese have a saying that “Internet multinationals all fail in China, Google was just the last one to go,” China has more people on-line than the population of the US.  The temptation is big. Four hundred million people surfing the Internet is a magnet for Internet businesses.

Sarah Lacy at Tech Crunch writes that China is the only country outside the US that’s given birth to several billion-dollar Internet companies and there’s a lot of growth left. With a market like this in China, US companies are quietly slipping back in to try again. 

The first time around, Yahoo was the only US company to survive, and they did it by buying a 40% share of Alibaba in 2005. Now there are whispers that Alibaba might buy Yahoo.

Remember Who’s Hacking Whom?

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the author of the award winning novels My Splendid Concubine and Our Hart. He also Blogs at The Soulful Veteran and Crazy Normal.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

More on Hacking Google

February 24, 2010

It seems that Global Voices Online has a lot to say about the accusations made implicating China in cyber attacks against Google and others.

If you want to read the conversation, click here. Making Fun of Charges for Hacking Google

I’m sure that those in America that have already made up their minds that China’s government is guilty of everything they read and hear about them will claim this conversation was contrived by the “Communists” to mislead.

Anything is possible, but prove it. According to the conversation, this technical school trains students to repair cars like programs found at two-year community colleges in the United States.

If you haven’t read the original post on this incident, check out what I wrote about Google.

Hillary Clinton

If the facts in this conversation are correct, shame on the New York Times, shame on Google and shame on Secretary of State Hillary R. Clinton for finding China guilty before the facts could be verified. The only thing China may be guilty of is calling their one political party (with seventy million members) “Communist”.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Innocent Until Proven Guilty

February 21, 2010

An American friend who taught English and lived in China for several years once said that it was possible to get around the government censors and reach sites that have been blocked.  It just takes time.  With that in mind, pointing fingers, as Google and Secretary of State Clinton did over the Google hacking episode, was a blunder and an insult to the Chinese people and their government.

Catching clever, cyber criminals on the Internet is not easy—especially if those criminals are Geeks getting thrills hacking into protected Websites. From what I’ve learned, organized Internet criminals are worse and harder to catch.

Shadow Land, the post before this one, is a case in point.

To understand more, I suggest you read How Prisoners Are Using Facebook to Harass Their Victims , and remember, next time you decide to blame the Chinese government for everything that happens in China, hold your tongue with forceps until the evidence—not opinions—proves guilt.

Consider that China has 1.3 billion people and only seventy million belong to the Communist party that rules the country. And regardless of popular Western opinions, the Chinese government does not control everything the Chinese people do with their daily lives and they never will.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse