
Google will start warning Chinese users about problematic search terms - raldi
http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/05/better-search-in-mainland-china.html
======
JackC
This is totally badass. Instead of a technical solution to a technical
problem, Google is going with a political solution to a political problem.

There are a ton of technical ways Google could silently defend against this
particular form of censorship (someone suggested reencoding the offending
characters), thus starting a cat-and-mouse game with the censors. But that
would (1) be an "act of war" in terms of blatantly attempting to pierce
China's Great Firewall, giving China an incentive just to block Google
wholesale; (2) not inform people that their searches were being censored; and
(3) be a lot of work, with no likelihood that they could ever keep searches
uncensored for very long.

By playing totally dumb, and saying "huh, we've noticed some kind of technical
problem with your search, try phrasing it a different way," Google (1) takes
no overt action to evade the censorship; yet (2) lets everyone know it's
happening and subtly encourages them to try to evade it themselves; and (3)
sets up a system that sees any censorship as damage and routes around it,
which hopefully is an approach that's relatively difficult to counter without
blocking the whole site, and is how the internet ought to work anyway.

In conclusion: from the little I know of what's going on here, this is a
seriously clever move. Interested to see how China responds.

~~~
yaix
"""By playing totally dumb ..."""

In China, that is actually the usual way to get around the law.

------
grandalf
Removing the censorship was never the best way to help dissent in China.
Simply indicating that the requested search had some results censored is the
most potent way to fight censorship and stew dissent.

When I suggested this a few years ago and criticized Google's decision to un-
censor the results, all my comments were brutally modded down.

It seems that Google has finally seen the wisdom of this approach. The next
move for China is to ban Google completely, which is sadly much easier now
that Baidu has had a few more years to gain traction and market share.

~~~
lomegor
One of the reasons they back down on China was because they could not compete
with Baidu. It's not just the ethical 'I won't censor my results' (which in my
own view, is a good thing).

I'm not sure how their decision went, but I assume that they did their
research first to see if their changes would really drop their marketplace
share too much. I'm not sure if China will block Google... if they do I don't
think it would be much different than Google censuring their own results (the
censored content would not be accessible). When people try to go to Google
they would notice it's censored too.

~~~
Retric
They ignore China because it was bad publicity and not worth the rounding
error gain in net profits. There are plenty of obvious problems hosting a
website in China but you need to add it's a poor country where it takes
several times to traffic and several times the resources to make the same
income.

PS: Don't believe me? _in a country with 457 million Internet users... Baidu
currently has a 75.8 share of China's search engine market, according to
Beijing-based research firm Analysys International. Google is a distant second
with a 19.2 percent share._ And with that 75% share Baidu, had a net profits
for the quarter ended March 31 were US$164 million. Compared to Google's
$10,645 million last quarter.
([http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/226507/chinas_...](http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/226507/chinas_baidu_revenue_profits_up_on_strong_traffic_growth.html))

------
joejohnson
I can imagine this blog post was very carefully written; Google subtly avoids
mentioning that these "interruptions" are likely due to the massive censorship
measures in place in China. Can anyone explain why seemingly innocuous terms
like 江 (Jiāng) are being censored?

~~~
yaix
"Jiang" may refer to "Jiang Zeming" (former President some ten years ago).

There was some rumors a few weeks ago that he had died. China is currently in
a transition of power from one to the next president (there have only been two
such transitions so far, and there is no established legal process for it
yet). Jiang Zeming is seen as a stabalizing factor during that process.

So, having rumors floating around that he died, would be potentially risky to
stability (because people very easily believe stuff and easily get nuts about
totally unfounded news, because you never know what to believe and what not if
there is no independend press).

~~~
shrikant
More detail here: Jiang Zemin death rumours spark China web crackdown -
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-14054456>

Not a few weeks ago though; appears to be from nearly 10 months back.

------
ComputerGuru
There's something I don't get - why is the Great Firewall of China only
blocking these terms in GET requests?

If it's only GET, then a user can use POST to search and bypass all this
entirely - Google just has to change the request type, which IMHO is much
easier than what they just did.

If it's both GET and POST, then I don't see how typing in the infringing
character which is then POST'd via AJAX is any less prone to connection
termination than a GET search request.

It doesn't add up.

EDIT: downvotes? Seriously?

~~~
axiak
It's possible google stores the finite list of bad queries in JS and has the
user's browser do the comparison client-side.

~~~
themgt
Yep - the web page is a client-side app, proactively warning the user about
problems in the network

~~~
zachrose
Let's get that list!

~~~
eneveu
I wonder if they load the whole list of "bad" terms on the client-side.
Wouldn't that trigger the firewall? Unless they encrypt it, or use a bloom
filter (which would save some bandwidth)...

~~~
matt4711
not sure if a bloom filter with false positives would be a good idea in this
case.

------
andos
The same blog post in Chinese is provided as a 10 MB PDF [1]. My PDF reader
simply gives up while loading it and prints insane amounts of error messages.
I'm guessing they converted all the text to curves to avoid being censored?

[1]
[http://services.google.com/fh/files/blogs/google_chinasearch...](http://services.google.com/fh/files/blogs/google_chinasearchchinese.pdf)

------
woodall
My over engineered solution. Catch the bad letter and replace it with a
something else(i.e. another value mapped to a separate fontface). Translate
the request on the server side being sure to reencode the page if it contains
a 'bad letter'.

Demo: <http://christopherwoodall.com/ceasar/>

~~~
eli
Well, yeah, you could also get a proper VPN that encrypts your traffic, but
that's a bit beside the point.

------
einmus
I think this is quite a brilliant move for Google. I know a lot of Chinese
people considering Google inferior, because "I often don't get anything when I
use Google. It must be a company of inferior technology." Actually, they have
just encountered the GFW's reset, and for common people it's natural to blame
the site. Now with this move, these people will gradually know that it's GFW's
censorship.

------
hasker
I am totally naive to these cat and mouse games, but why does not Google just
force SSL in China? They would have to turn off the partial searches feature,
which has been shown to leak the cleartext, but I think it would totally fix
any sort of censorship. Then again, maybe this type of response works better
politically.

~~~
brian_cloutier
SSL only works if you trust the certificate authorities.

~~~
hasker
Yes, but that would be likely detected, and the CA that had its private key
stolen or coerced for government use would be exposed nonrepudiatably. All
browser makers would immediately drop the bad certificate. In the case of
targeted connections, this may avoid detection though.

~~~
4ad
You seem to be unaware that businesses (and governments) can legitimately buy
keys that allow MITMing SSL connection or they could just be a CA themselves
(no problem for China).

It is annoying that people downvote you instead of explaining your error in
your assumption about SSL.

~~~
hasker
Yes, but then that bogus certificate is in the wild. Once once someone has a
copy of a bogus certificate, then they can prove that that CA is corrupt. That
CA loses its business model. What I am saying does not prevent one-off
attacks, but all it takes is one person to capture a bad certificate to
discredit a CA. Hence it would not work in a universal censorship scheme as
Google is combating. Maybe I am still overlooking something, and I suppose
China could just SSL proxy the whole country, which would defeat all of this.

~~~
4ad
You are very confused about how SSL in the context of HTTP works. Here's the
best talk I know of this subject:

BlackHat USA 2011: SSL And The Future Of Authenticity:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Wl2FW2TcA>

------
loceng
Brilliant. Raising awareness will not let people forget and become comfortable
with the status quo.

~~~
robbfitzsimmons
I'm in China right now and simply astounded at the apathy I see from even very
well-educated folks, though. Local Chinese roommate works at Oracle and is
completely fine with censored search, doesn't use VPN, etc. And this is beyond
the less technical people, many of whom aren't even aware of the firewall.

I think this is still a clever and classy move for Google, though I just
wonder if it motivates people beyond those already intrinsically motivated (a
relatively large % of current Google.CN users).

~~~
moreorless
You're astounded because well-educated people from other cultures don't care
about the same things you do?

------
bryze
That blog entry was pretty non-technical. Does anyone have a clue why this
might be happening? It's not like 江 is in any way uncommon.

~~~
nsanch
The implication is that the Great Firewall will see a GET for
google.com/search?q=[any of those characters] (or equivalent) and not let you
get to google for a minute afterward.

~~~
sp332
But why would the Great Firewall block such common things?

~~~
azernik
Presumably, they're characters that are either in sensitive personal/place
names, or they're part of commonly used and politically significant euphemisms
or idioms.

There's also possibly a punitive element of this: in addition to whatever
issues they have with some search terms, the Chinese authorities may have
decided to be trigger-happy with the banning as a punishment to Google for
ceasing its cooperation on search filtering.

------
kymair
As a Chinese, I think this feature is quite useful for us.Though I use VPN
most of the time, I do dislike being interrupted for several minutes when I
accidentally searched some censored words.

~~~
moreorless
Why do people like to start a point with "As a x"? Does it mean that he/she
speaks for the group as a whole or does it add extra relevancy?

~~~
zem
extra relevance. it's a valuable datapoint to see what someone who is actually
affected by the censorship thinks of google's new measure.

------
happypeter
So everybody plz try to help us, voice of a google user from China.

------
adrianbg
And so, the wall crumbles.

------
aklofas
Since when is McDonalds a sensitive/censored query? (And why?)

------
revelation
Way to beat around the bush. This is the botched censorship system, and at
least Google used to make that clear. Nowadays, they show you 10 minutes of HD
video of someone trying out various search queries in various browsers and
being blocked.

And they have the chuzpe to add "we have checked our systems and couldn't find
anything". Way to make yourself complicit.

There have already been congressional hearings into Google's business in
china, back when they still tried to enable unhindered access for users there.

~~~
azernik
I did find it interesting that they got through that whole article without
using the words "blocked" or "censorship". However, your read of this is
completely off-base.

Reading between the lines: "Since we moved to Hong Kong and stopped filtering
search, the Chinese government is just cutting off internet connections that
are seen searching for sensitive terms; here's a workaround that will give you
advance warning, so you can rework your search phrasing."

------
iandanforth
This stinks of cowardice.

If Google has reason to suspect that these interruptions are caused by active
censorship by the Chinese government and are unwilling to do so out of fear of
that censorship we are all in trouble.

It's not as if the population of China is unaware of censorship. Helpful
reminders of what is socially acceptable and what are not have appeared in
colorful cartoon form for years online.

It's not as if the Chinese government denies controlling access to
information. They see it as a fundamental good to maintain the stability and
health of society.

The only place and time where this matters is where the censorship is cast is
a negative light. China doesn't want to be insulted on the international
stage, and it doesn't want companies promoting unrest among its people.
However that criticism is exactly what _must_ happen.

Google could describe what's going on as relating to 'sensitive' terminology.
They could describe the 'restrictions' as being imposed for the good of
society and apologize that non-sensitive terms are being caught up in the
fight for the greater good.

OR they could grow a pair.

Corporations in power have a responsibility to fight for the rights of those
people without power. They have a responsibility to do so visibly to set a
good example for others, and they have a responsibility to directly and
honestly criticize people, companies, and governments they see as violating
those rights.

This is an active debate with no guarantee of an outcome that favors American
style freedom of information. If the players who can fight this fight won't,
we're* fucked.

*We being those who want American style freedom's to exist globally.

~~~
benmccann
They are fighting it by giving Chinese internet users access to a search
engine that reveals when censorship is occurring. This is not a move that the
Chinese government will be happy about. Google needs to carefully toe a line
here. If they take a harder stance then the Chinese government will block them
100% from operating in China, which does far less good in fighting censorship.

