Absurdity, Allegory and China

I have just finished reading Googled by Ken Auletta, and I followed it up with James Fallows’ Atlantic Monthly piece, How to Save the News. A lot of good reading here, as well as a much deeper explanation of who and what Google is and what it appears they are doing, though it becomes a [...]

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Blogs and tweets are alive with the sound of Google v. China. The bare bones details can be found from hell to breakfast, though a good place to start is Danwei’s Bye bye Google. The chatter right now is incessant, though other than the fact that they’ve pulled the plug on censorship, weighed anchor and [...]

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When I first came to China in the late 90s, many of the people who are now stuck in traffic in their cars were still bicycling everywhere they went. Their dreams of ‘more things’ were there – of cars, of houses, of the latest in the latest, whatever that latest was – but money was [...]

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Google just can’t seem to keep themselves out of the news. With the developing tales of Chinese hacking – possibly traced to Jiaotong Univertsity in Shangahi and a particular class taught by a Ukranian prof at Lanxiang Vocational School in Shandong province – and their warning to China that they would be, sometime in the [...]

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Here’s a question from the “things may not always be what they seem” file. Is Google’s rushed and premature rollout of its latest product, Buzz, related to its ongoing cyber tussle with China? With the world’s two most popular social networking products, Facebook and Twitter, blocked in the People’s Republic (PRC), and Google believed to [...]

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I’ve ranted in here for the past two days concerning Google’s saddling of all Gmail account holders with Buzz, and what that might mean for info/data miners in countries where public security bureaus use geek goons to harvest information and lists. I think that if you have people in your Gmail contacts list who might [...]

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I am a hard sell when it comes to supporting conspiracy theories. That said, I am also not one to buy into private corporations’ self-promoting jingles, even if they have a long trail of mission statements, supportive philosophical documents, digitally spinning prayer wheels and mumbled mantras. Google doesn’t get a pass because they preach a [...]

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This post began as a response to a comment in an earlier blog post, where my friend Paul recommended that I read the following link: Google vs China: capitalist model, virtual wall, which I have done, and which initiated this entry. What I see at this point as possibly the most important aspect in this [...]

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I was fortunate enough to watch live last evening the informative roundtable discussion hosted by the New America Foundation Authority, Meet Technology: Will China’s Great Firewall Hold? as I mentioned yesterday here. For those interested in internet freedom on the eve of Secretary of State Clinton’s speech on the subject, I’ve embedded the YouTube link [...]

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Mark this one on your calendar: Authority, Meet Technology, “…a Slate/New America Foundation event about China, Google, and Internet freedom.” How will the China-Google skirmish shake out? What lessons or cautionary tales does China’s experience offer repressive governments and their tech-savvy opponents in places like Iran and Cuba? What, if anything, should the Obama administration [...]

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