Pacman on Google

If you haven’t seen it already, go to Google.com and click Insert Coin. It should work for the next day or so.

Nostalgia – and what a great tribute to Pacman’s 30th.

Details on the Google blog.

Google’s burning Chinese bridges

Five days ago, I reported that Google was (finally!) getting some cojones dealing with China.

Now, I’m very, very happy to say that the Googlies have stopped dancing with the devil. They’re re-directing the google.cn address – that’s the Google address used inside China – to google.com.hk. That’s the Hong Kong version of the Google search engine.

You can see for yourself. Go ahead and type google.cn into your favorite web browser.

At this point, the Chinese government authorities are not blocking access to google.com.hk. So folks inside China who thought they were going to the censored google.cn are being automatically routed to an uncensored version of Google, in various Chinese languages.

The New York Times has a good overview.

UPDATE: Looks like the PRC authorities have started filtering search results from the Hong Kong site. Washington Post article here. This is getting more interesting by the minute.

Is Google getting cojones in China?

News from MSNBC that Google is finally showing some previously-blocked pictures in response to searches on Google.cn.

A week ago, the Financial Times reported that Google wass “99.9% certain” to close down its censored Chinese search engine.  Now, it appears as if the engine is still chugging along, with some of the old censorship gone.

It’s refreshing to see pictures of the “tank man” at Tiananmen Square, and a tiny trickle of information about Tibet, coming from the censored version of Google.

In response, Google’s stock took a hit, but it’s coming back. Good on ya, Google.

Google does its part to wean people off Internet Explorer 6

IE 6 is dangerous. You know it. I’ve been warning you about it since November 2006. Even Microsoft admits it. Now Google’s doing something about it.

In the wake of the Chinese attack on Google, the Googlies are starting to pull back support for Internet Explorer 6, beginning on March 1.

Quoth the Beeb:

Google has now said it is going to phase out support for the browser “starting with Google Docs and Google Sites”.

Rajen Sheth, Google Senior Product Manager puts it this way:

Many other companies have already stopped supporting older browsers like Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers. We’re also going to begin phasing out our support, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites on March 1st. So while you’ll still be able to access these Google applications, newer features may not be available and some features may even stop working.

Thanks to HFP for the heads-up!

Larry and Sergey to sell $5,500,000,000 in stock over next five years

Yep, that’s 5.5 BILLION smackers.

I wondered why Google stock went down on Friday.

Brian Womack at Business Week reports:

Google Inc. founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have adopted five-year trading plans to sell about 5 million shares each, reducing their combined ownership of stock outstanding to 15 percent from 18 percent… Based on today’s closing stock price, each would get about $2.75 billion from selling the shares.

Cool, eh? You could buy a whole lotta Egg McMuffins with that stack.

To look at it another way, they’re cashing out stock worth about 50% more than the Gross National Product of Haiti.

Chinese activist attacks based on Internet Explorer 0day?

Brian Krebs reports that the attacks on Chinese human rights activists that I talked about a couple of days ago – the attack that led Google to finally take a stand in support of basic human dignity over corporate profits – was made possible by my favorite security whipping boy, Internet Explorer.

Microsoft has confirmed the 0day hole in Security Advisory 979352.

It looks like the IE 0day is only part of the story, though. The attacks were made possible by a smorgasbord of 0day holes. Researchers are still looking at all of the problems.

The Washington Post (now without Krebs) says that the Google attack is much larger than originally thought:

Computer attacks on Google that the search giant said originated in China were part of a concerted political and corporate espionage effort that exploited security flaws in e-mail attachments to sneak into the networks of major financial, defense and technology companies and research institutions in the United States… At least 34 companies — including Yahoo, Symantec, Adobe, Northrop Grumman and Dow Chemical — were attacked, according to congressional and industry sources.

The bottom line for home users is pretty simple: the bad guys aren’t out to get you, and at the moment you don’t have anything to worry about. These are sophisticated, targeted attacks that haven’t yet made it out into the general population.

But remember who’s behind it, and why, OK?

Google starts to get its China, uh, stuff together

As a long-time Tibetan human rights supporter, it pleases me no end that Google seems to be having a change of heart.

Google lawyer David Drummond just posted this on the Official Google Blog:

In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google… we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists… we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users’ computers…

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

Maybe I can go back to believing in Google’s original vision.

Comparing Microsoft’s ruthless execs to Google’s cold engineers

Todd Bishop at TechFlash just posted an insightful interview with Ken Auletta, the author of both World War 3.0 (about Microsoft during the halcyon antitrust days) and Googled (an insider’s account of the Googlies).

“Microsoft, I came to think, were cold businessmen. They really wanted to harm Netscape,” Auletta said. “Google, they’re not cold businessmen, they’re cold engineers. No, it’s true. They’re not trying to kill the opposition, but they will kill opposition, but it’s inadvertent. … They’re not consumed by the thought of destroying their opposition. Bill Gates was consumed — and Microsoft was consumed — by the thought of destroying Netscape.”

Good stuff.