Google's China threat is a rare show of defiance

BEIJING – Google's threat to end its operations in China over censorship and computer-security concerns could embarrass communist leaders who crave international respect. Yet it appears unlikely that many other companies would follow suit and try to change how business is done in China.

"As long as you aren't involved in politics, the media or pornography, the government will leave you alone," said Siva Yam, president of the United States of America-China Chamber of Commerce, which primarily represents U.S. companies in China.

Such high-tech companies as Microsoft Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. had no comment on Google's announcement Tuesday that it would stop censoring results on its Chinese search engine at Google.cn and might leave the country entirely.

Yahoo Inc. said it was "aligned" with Google's position, though it's not clear what that would mean. Yahoo closed its offices in China several years ago when it sold much of its business there to the Alibaba Group. Yahoo retains a 39 percent stake in Alibaba, and Yahoo spokeswoman Nina Blackwell declined to say whether the company would consider selling its holdings.

Google angered free-speech advocates when it created its China search engine, Google.cn, in 2006 and agreed to exclude links to sites blocked by government filters, popularly known as the Great Firewall of China.

Now Google's decision to confront Beijing might help repair its image.

"Google is putting the other companies in a delicate position, raising the ante and trying to occupy the higher moral ground," said Jean-Pierre Cabestan, head of government studies at Hong Kong Baptist University. "Other companies that are ready to cooperate with Chinese censorship maybe are going to be criticized and targeted by human rights activists."

There was no government reaction in Beijing to Google's announcement Tuesday, which said the company was dismayed by hacking attacks launched from within China. Google said the attacks were apparently designed to break into the computers of U.S. companies and gather information about human rights activists.

China's state Xinhua News Agency cited an unidentified Cabinet official as saying the government was seeking more information from the company. A statement from the Chinese consulate in San Francisco said: "The Internet of China is open. The Chinese government encourages the development and usage of the Internet. The law of China prohibits any kind of cyber attacks. We welcome Internet companies to operate in China according to Chinese law."

At the very least Google's threat sets up a conflict between the govermment's desire to maintain strict controls on the Web and the hopes of its increasingly prosperous, sophisticated citizens. Many of them poured out support for Google on Wednesday.

Visitors left flowers and lit candles outside Google's offices in Beijing's high-tech Haidian district. Notes on bunches of flowers said, "Thank You Google" and "Google Bye-bye."

"I'm here to pay my respects to Google because they did not lose their dignity and they stayed true to their company's beliefs," said You Liwei, 28, who works in publishing. Other visitors bowed in a traditional gesture of respect.

Comments on Chinese Internet bulletin boards pleaded with Google to stay. A note on Tianya.cn hailed Google as a "great soldier of freedom," while on the Web site of the ruling party newspaper People's Daily, a visitor appealed for a compromise.

"Google is good. For the sake of technology advancement, the Chinese side should reach a cooperative agreement," the note said.

Google managers told employees to go home, and they did not know whether to come back Thursday, said an employee who spoke on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to talk to reporters. Google has been able to hire its pick of China's brightest university graduates since its Beijing office opened in 2005.

Chinese regulators have backed down in rare cases over other technology issues. In June, the government gave in to complaints by trade groups and withdrew a demand that computer makers include "Green Dam" Internet-filtering software with PCs. Early last year, after Washington objected, China withdrew a demand that companies reveal how their computer security technology works.

But foreign companies have long accepted far-reaching government control in exchange for access to the huge and growing Chinese market.

In industries from automaking to fast food, companies have been forced to let communist authorities influence or even dictate their choices of local partners, where to operate and what products to sell. Companies avoid saying anything that might prompt retaliation.

Internet services have faced special challenges given that information, their core business, is even more tightly controlled than manufacturing of autos or home appliances. Indeed on Wednesday, the president of General Motors Corp.'s China group, Kevin Wale, said state-required partnerships help GM navigate the restrictions it faces in China.

"They're not causing us any major impact at the moment," he said.

Meanwhile, China regularly blocks access to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube — which is owned by Google. So to run Web sites in the country, companies have agreed to avoid certain material.

For instance, Microsoft disabled some blogging services that carried comments the Chinese government disliked. Yahoo once handed over e-mail account information that led to a jail sentence for a writer — prompting U.S. Rep. Tom Lantos to tell Yahoo executives in a congressional hearing that "morally you are pygmies."

Cisco, the world's biggest maker of computer-networking equipment, has been criticized by human rights groups because its technology is used by the Chinese government to censor Web sites and spy on Internet traffic.

The company declined to comment on Google's possible pullout. In the past, Cisco has defended its business practices in China, saying that it doesn't modify its equipment for the Chinese market and that it is up to customers, not Cisco, how its devices are programmed.

Google had 32 percent of China search revenue in 2009, versus 61 percent for Baidu.com, according to Analysys International, a Beijing research firm. The prospect that Baidu's main rival could leave sent Baidu's U.S. shares up $54.36, or 14 percent, to $440.85 in afternoon trading Wednesday.

Google shares were down $6.93, or 1.2 percent, to $583.55. Google contends that China accounts for an "immaterial" percentage of its $22 billion in annual revenue. J.P. Morgan analyst Imran Khan had been expecting Google's revenue from China to be about $600 million this year.

On Wednesday, Google.cn appeared to be still censoring some results. A search for the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement returned a message saying the browser could not open the page. A notice on the site said some results were deleted in line with regulations.

Google.cn said its top search term of the day was "Tiananmen," likely from people looking for material on the violent crackdown on pro-democracy protests in 1989. The No. 2 topic was "Google leaving China."

Google to end China censorship after e-mail breach

SAN FRANCISCO – Google Inc. will stop censoring its search results in China and may pull out of the country completely after discovering that computer hackers had tricked human-rights activists into exposing their e-mail accounts to outsiders.

The change of heart announced Tuesday heralds a major shift for the Internet's search leader, which has repeatedly said it will obey Chinese laws requiring some politically and socially sensitive issues to be blocked from search results available in other countries. The acquiescence had outraged free-speech advocates and even some shareholders, who argued Google's cooperation with China violated the company's "don't be evil" motto.

The criticism had started to sway Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who openly expressed his misgivings about the company's presence in China.

But the tipping point didn't come until Google recently uncovered hacking attacks launched from within China. The apparent goal: gathering personal information about dozens of human rights activists trying to shine a light on the country's censorship and other secretive policies.

Google officials said they plan to talk to the Chinese government to determine if there is a way the company can still provide unfiltered search results in the country. If an agreement can't be worked out, Google is prepared to leave China four years after creating a search engine bearing China's Web suffix, ".cn" to put itself in a better position to profit from the world's most populous country.

"The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences," David Drummond, Google's top lawyer, wrote in a Tuesday blog posting.

A spokesman for the Chinese consulate in San Francisco had no immediate comment.

Abandoning China wouldn't put a big dent in Google's earnings, although it could crimp the company's growth as the country's Internet usage continues to rise. Google, based in Mountain View, said its Chinese operations account for an "immaterial" amount of its roughly $22 billion in annual revenue.

Although Google's search engine is the most popular worldwide, it's a distant second in China, where the homegrown Baidu.com processes more than 60 percent of all requests.

Free-speech and human rights groups are hoping Google's about-face will spur more companies to take a similar stand.

"Google has taken a bold and difficult step for Internet freedom in support of fundamental human rights," said Leslie Harris, president of the Center for Democracy & Technology, a civil-liberties group in Washington. "No company should be forced to operate under government threat to its core values or to the rights and safety of its users."

It's "an incredibly significant move," said Danny O'Brien, international outreach coordinator at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet rights group in San Francisco. "This changes the game because the question won't be 'How can we work in China?' but 'How can we create services that Chinese people can use, from outside of China?'"

Google's new stance on China was triggered by a sophisticated computer attack orchestrated from within the country. Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., praised Google for disclosing chicanery that "raises serious national security concerns."

Without providing details, Google said it and at least 20 other major companies from the Internet, financial services, technology, media and chemical industries were targeted. The heist lifted some of Google's intellectual property but didn't get any information about the users of its services, the company said. Google has passed along what it knows so far to U.S. authorities and other affected companies.

The assault on Google appeared primarily aimed at breaking into the company's e-mail system, "Gmail," in an attempt to pry into the accounts of human right activists protesting the Chinese government's policies.

Only two e-mail accounts were infiltrated in these attacks, Google said, and the intruders were only able to see subject lines and the dates that the individual accounts were created. None of the content written within the body of the e-mails leaked out, Google said.

As part of its investigation into that incident, Google stumbled onto another scam that was more successful. Google said dozens of activists fighting the Chinese government's policies fell prey to ruses commonly known as "phishing" or malware. The victims live in the United States, Europe and China, Google said.

Phishing involves malicious e-mails urging the recipients to open an attachment or visit a link that they're conned into believing comes from a friend or legitimate company. Clicking on a phishing link of installs malware — malicious software — on to computers.

Once it's installed on a computer, malware can be used as a surveillance tool that can obtain passwords and unlock e-mail accounts.

Google's unfettered search results won't necessarily ensure more information will be made available to the average person in China because the government could still use its own filtering tools, said Clothilde Le Coz, Washington director for Reporters Without Borders, a media watchdog group.

"The Chinese government is one of the most efficient in terms of censoring the Web," she said.

Big Bang atom smasher sends beams in 2 directions

GENEVA – The world's largest atom smasher made another leap forward Monday by circulating beams of protons in opposite directions at the same time in the $10 billion machine after more than a year of repairs, organizers said.

The true test will be in first two months of 2010, when scientists plan to start colliding protons to see what they can discover about the makeup of the universe and its tiniest particles.

The Large Hadron Collider has been advancing faster than expected in its startup phase that began Friday night, said Rolf Heuer, director-general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN.

"It went much faster than foreseen," said Fabiola Gianotti, who speaks for the Atlas experiment, one of four major detectors in rooms the size of cathedrals about 100 meters (300 feet) underground. "We're all very happy."

It is possible that some unintended proton collisions began Monday or will occur soon at the places where the two beams cross as a side-effect of trying to synchronize the timing of two beams.

Intentional proton collisions could begin within the next 10 days, mainly to check how the machine is working, said spokesman James Gillies.

Ultimately, the collider aims to create conditions like they were 1 trillionth to 2 trillionths of a second after the Big Bang — which scientists think marked the creation of the universe billions of years ago. Physicists also hope the collider will help them see and understand other suspected phenomena, such as dark matter, antimatter and supersymmetry.

The collider was started with great fanfare Sept. 10, 2008, only to be heavily damaged by an electrical fault nine days later. It has taken 14 months to repair and add protection systems to the machine before it was restarted.

The protons on Monday were traveling at almost the speed of light — 11,000 times a second in each direction around the 27-kilometer (17-mile) tunnel under the Swiss-French border at Geneva.

Initial signs are very good, physicists told a news conference. The beam is of superb quality, with the protons tightly packed into hairlike lines and guided by some 1,600 superconducting magnets — some 15 meters (50 feet) long — operating at temperatures colder than outer space for maximum electrical efficiency.

So far the machine is operating at 450 billion electron volts of energy, which is relatively low compared with its design capability of more than 14 times that. It soon will overtake the world's current most powerful accelerator, the Tevatron at Fermilab outside Chicago, which operates at 1 trillion electron volts, or TeV.

Myers said the CERN collider should be ramped up to 1.2 TeV by Christmas. CERN might decide to make the first collisions at the current low energy or at 1.2 TeV, but that will be more for calibration purposes than for making scientific discoveries, he said.

Physicists said the discoveries could begin in the first half of next year when the collider reaches 3.5 TeV. CERN is hoping to have the first collisions at that energy in January or early February, said Gillies.

"That would really mark the start of the research program," he said.

Myers said the collider may even go up to 5 TeV before the end of 2010.

Tejinder S. Virdee, a physicist from London's Imperial College who represents more than 2,000 scientists on CMS, another of the experiments with its own detectors at CERN, said it could take several years before the collider discovers the elusive Higgs boson, a particle that theoretically gives mass to other subatomic particles, and thus everything in the universe.

That is because the Higgs boson is believed to be hard to see and needs powerful energy to be revealed, Virdee said.

"This is going to take a few years," he said.

Director-General Heuer said CERN was being as cautious as a driver would be with the first production model of a new car.

"We'll never accelerate this the first time with a kick-start to its maximum velocity," he said.

Once it is tested out, he added, "we can open windows into new physics and that could happen already next year. It depends on how kind nature is to us."