US calls for China Google Probe

[Brett_Tabke]

BBC Article [izurl.com]

The US has called on Beijing to investigate the recent cyber attacks on Google, which have prompted the search giant to threaten to leave China.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that companies such as Google should refuse to support "politically-motivated censorship".

She also said China along with Tunisia and Uzbekistan had boosted censorship.

Google says hackers tried to infiltrate its software coding and the e-mail accounts of human rights activists.

The BBC's Kim Ghattas at the State Department says Mrs Clinton's remarks are bound to anger the Chinese authorities, who have sought to play down the incident.

China says the row should not be linked to relations with the US.

Vice-Foreign Minister He Yafei said the rift with the web company should not be "over-interpreted", according to state news agency Xinhua.

[albo]

Interesting (or not?) Clinton didn't insist GOOG *prove* GOOG's employees are "without blame": there had been some small question otherwise.

[walkman]

Related: [nytimes.com...]

BEIJING — As the Chinese government expands what it calls a campaign against #*$!ography, cellular companies in Beijing and Shanghai have been told to suspend text services to cellphone users who are found to have sent messages with “illegal or unhealthy content,” state-run news media reported Tuesday.

China Mobile, one of the nation’s largest cellular providers, reported that text messages would automatically be scanned for “key words” provided by the police, according to China Daily, a state-controlled English-language newspaper. Messages will be deemed “unhealthy” if they violate undisclosed criteria established by the central government, the newspaper said.

French fry sales ;)?

[Hugene]

The extent to which governments are starting to monitor their own citizens is plain scary. In China, Iran, Uzbekistan and other dictatorships, the situation is just horrible, and getting worse, but the "democratic" west isn't far behind at times. What needs to be done is an empowering of consumers, as for example the default https [gmailblog.blogspot.com] in Gmail.

[maximillianos]

HTTPS is not even safe. There are already corporate products out there that decrypt HTTPS for monitoring employees.

[Hugene]

That's bad news.

[subhankar ray]

Corporation does not have to break https/SSL, if the connection goes via their proxy.

[bill]

There are already corporate products out there that decrypt HTTPS for monitoring employees.

Yes, it's called a proxy. If a corporation runs all your traffic through one of these filtering proxies and it accepts SSL connections, then they could decrypt anything. They would be acting as a man-in-the-middle. That's quite different from SSL being unsafe.

[kapow]

Assuming no proxy, Can SSL be decrypted?